She was with him here, however, but to a certain point. “You mustn’t drag them out too much—must you? Won’t he think in that case you may want to retract?”
Yule apparently tried to focus Mr. Prodmore under this delusion, and with a success that had a quick, odd result. “I shouldn’t be so terribly upset by his mistake, you know, even if he did!”
His manner, with its slight bravado, left her proportionately shocked. “Oh, it would never do to give him any colour whatever for supposing you to have any doubt that, as one may say, you’ve pledged your honour.”
He devoted to this proposition more thought than its simplicity would have seemed to demand; but after a minute, at all events, his intelligence triumphed. “Of course not—not when I haven’t any doubt!”
Though his intelligence had triumphed, she still wished to show she was there to support it. “How can you possibly have any—any more than you can possibly have that one’s honour is everything in life?” And her charming eyes expressed to him her need to feel that he was quite at one with her on that point.
He could give her every assurance. “Oh, yes—everything in life!”
It did her much good, brought back the rest of her brightness. “Wasn’t it just of the question of the honour of things that we talked awhile ago—and of the difficulty of sometimes keeping our sense of it clear? There’s no more to be said therefore,” she went on with the faintest soft sigh about it, “except that I leave you to your ancient glory as I leave you to your strict duty.” She had these things there before her; they might have been a well-spread board from which she turned away fasting. “I hope you’ll do justice to dear old Covering in spite of its weak points, and I hope above all you’ll not be incommoded——”
As she hesitated here he was too intent. “Incommoded——?”
She saw it better than she could express it. “Well, by such a rage——!”
He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it will be a rage?”