“It didn’t strike you that I might?”
She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t quarrel with me about it now!”
“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.
She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no delicacy. Cora told me.”
Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know——?”
“She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused you.”
The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show—by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done—that he felt no personal wound. “Do you call that quite right?”
Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For her—yes; and for Prodmore.”
“Oh, for Prodmore”—his laugh grew more grim—“with all my heart!”
This, then,—her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,—was all she meant. “To stay at your post—that was the way I showed you.”