He threw back his head: she had scattered over the word “interest” such a friendly, faded colour. She was either not joking or was rich indeed; and there was a place always kept in his conversation for the arrival of money, as there is always a box in a well-appointed theatre for that of royalty. “Am I to take it from you then that you know about my interest——?”
“Everything!” said Mrs. Gracedew with a world of wit.
“Excuse me, madam!”—he himself was now more reserved. “You don’t know everything if you don’t know that my interest—considerable as it might well have struck you—has just ceased to exist. I’ve given it up”—Mr. Prodmore softened the blow—“for a handsome equivalent.”
The blow fell indeed light enough. “You mean for a handsome son-in-law?”
“It will be by some such description as the term you use that I shall doubtless, in the future, permit myself, in the common course, to allude to Captain Yule. Unless indeed I call him——” But Mr. Prodmore dropped the bolder thought. “It will depend on what he calls me.”
Mrs. Gracedew covered him a moment with the largeness of her charity. “Won’t it depend a little on what your daughter herself calls him?”
Mr. Prodmore seriously considered. “No. That,” he declared with delicacy, “will be between the happy pair.”
“Am I to take it from you then—I adopt your excellent phrase,” Mrs. Gracedew said—“that Miss Prodmore has already accepted him?”
Her companion, with his head still in the air, seemed to signify that he simply put it down on the table and that she could take it or not as she liked. “Her character—formed by my assiduous care—enables me to locate her, I may say even to time her, from moment to moment.” His massive watch, as he opened it, further sustained him in this process. “It’s my assured conviction that she’s accepting him while we stand here.”
Mrs. Gracedew was so affected by his assured conviction that, with an odd, inarticulate sound, she forbore to stand longer—she rapidly moved away, taking one of the brief excursions of step and sense that had been for her, from the first, under the noble roof, so many dumb but decisive communions. But it was soon over, and she floated back on a wave that showed her to be, since she had let herself go, by this time quite in the swing and describing a considerable curve. “Dear Mr. Prodmore, why are you so imprudent as to make your daughter afraid of you? You should have taught her to confide in you. She has clearly shown me,” she almost soothingly pursued, “that she can confide.”