Mrs. Gracedew did it complete justice. “I see. An older friend.”
Cora listened as at a warning sound; yet she had by this time practically let herself go, and it took but Mrs. Gracedew’s extended encouraging hand, which she quickly seized, to bring the whole thing out. “I’ve been trying this hour, in my terrible need of advice, to tell you about him!” It came in a small clear torrent, a soft tumble-out of sincerity. “After we parted—you and I—at the station, he suddenly turned up there, and I took a little quiet walk with him which gave you time to get here before me and of which my father is in a state of ignorance that I don’t know whether to regard as desirable or dreadful.”
Mrs. Gracedew, attentive and wise, might have been, for her face, the old family solicitor. “You want me then to inform your father?” It was a wonderful intonation.
Poor Cora, for that matter too, might suddenly have become under this touch the prodigal with a list of debts. She seemed an instant to look out of a blurred office window-pane at a grey London sky; then she broke away. “I really don’t know what I want. I think,” she honestly admitted, “I just want kindness.”
Mrs. Gracedew’s expression might have hinted—but not for too long—that Bedford Row was an odd place to apply for it; she appeared for an instant to make the revolving office-chair creak. “What do you mean by kindness?”
Cora was a model client—she perfectly knew. “I mean help.”
Mrs. Gracedew closed an inkstand with a clap and locked a couple of drawers. “What do you mean by help?”
The client’s inevitable answer seemed to perch on the girl’s lips: “A thousand pounds.” But it came out in another, in a much more charming form. “I mean that I love him.”
The family solicitor got up: it was a high figure. “And does he love you?”
Cora hesitated. “Ask him.”