He stood up and brought a close to the business interview, and was gripping Mr. Philip's hand, when a sudden recollection reddened his face. "Ah, there's one thing," he said quite lightly, though the vein down the middle of his forehead had darkened. "You see from those letters that a Senor Vicente de Rojas is making an offer for the house. He's not to have it. Do you understand? Not at any price." The effect of this restriction, made obviously at the behest of some deep passion, was to make him suddenly sinister. They gazed at him as though he had revealed that he carried arms. But Ellen remembered business again. "Those letters," she reminded Mr. Philip, "had I not better read them over before Mr. Yaverland goes?" Yaverland caught his breath, then spoke off-handedly. "You're forgetting. They don't speak Spanish in Brazil, but Portuguese." And added confidentially, "Of course you were thinking of the Argentine." She was as hurt by the revelation of this vast breach in her omniscience as the bright twang of knowingness in her voice had told him she would be. "Yes," she said unsteadily, "I was thinking of the Argentine." He shook hands with Mr. Philip, and she took him down the corridor to the door. She blinked back her tears as he stood at the head of the stair and put up his collar with those strange hands that were speckled like a snake's belly, for it seemed a waste, like staying indoors when the menagerie procession is going round the town, to let anything so unusual go away without seeing as much of it as possible. Then she remembered the thing that she had wanted to say in the other room, and wondered if it would be bold to speak, and finally remarked in a voice disagreeable with shyness, "The people up on the Pentland Hills use that word you said was in Shakespeare. Snow-broth. When the hill-streams run full after the melting of the snows, that's snow-broth." He liked women who were interested in queer-shaped fragments of fact, for they reminded him of his mother. He took pains to become animated at her news. "They do, they do!" Ellen assured him, pleased by his response. "And they say 'hit' for 'it,' which is Anglo-Saxon."