The confidence in it was so tender that it sounded almost like pity, and the young man took it up with all the flush of the sense that pity could be but for him. This sense broke full in her face. “The scoundrel!”
“Not a bit!” she returned, with equal passion—“I was only too clever for him!” The thought of it was again an exaltation in which she pushed her friend aside. “So let me go!”
The push was like a jar that made the vessel overflow, and he was before her now as if he stretched across the hall. “With the heroic view of your power and the barren beauty of your sacrifice? You pour out money, you move a mountain, and to let you ‘go,’ to close the door fast behind you, is all I can figure out to do for you?” His emotion trembled out of him with the stammer of a new language, but it was as if in a minute or two he had thrown over all consciousness. “You’re the most generous—you’re the noblest of women! The wonderful chance that brought you here——!”
His own arm was grasped now—she knew better than he about the wonderful chance. “It brought you at the same happy hour! I’ve done what I liked,” she went on very simply; “and the only way to thank me is to believe it.”
“You’ve done it for a proud, poor man”—his answer was quite as direct. “He has nothing—in the light of such a magic as yours—either to give or to hope; but you’ve made him, in a little miraculous hour, think of you——”
He stumbled with the rush of things, and if silence can, in its way, be active, there was a collapse too, for an instant, on her closed lips. These lips, however, she at last opened. “How have I made him think of me?”
“As he has thought of no other woman!” He had personal possession of her now, and it broke, as he pressed her, as he pleaded, the helpless fall of his eloquence. “Mrs. Gracedew—don’t leave me.” He jerked his head passionately at the whole place and the yellow afternoon. “If you made me care——”
“It was surely that you had made me first!” She laughed, and her laugh disengaged her, so that before he could reply she had again put space between them.
He accepted the space now—he appeared so sure of his point. “Then let me go on caring. When I asked you awhile back for some possible adjustment to my new source of credit, you simply put off the question—told me I must trust to time for it. Well,” said Clement Yule, “I’ve trusted to time so effectually that ten little minutes have made me find it. I’ve found it because I’ve so quickly found you. May I, Mrs. Gracedew, keep all that I’ve found? I offer you in return the only thing I have to give—I offer you my hand and my life.”
She held him off, across the hall, for a time almost out of proportion to the previous wait he had just made so little of. Then at last also, when she answered, it might have passed for a plea for further postponement, even for a plea for mercy. “Ah, Captain Yule——!” But she turned suddenly off: the flower had been nipped in the bud by the re-entrance of Chivers, at whom his master veritably glowered.