It was the young man who first, in his comparative simplicity, put out a hand. “If I’ve not come before, Mr. Prodmore, it was--very frankly speaking--from the dread of seeing _you_!” His speech contradicted, to some extent, his gesture, but Clement Yule’s was an aspect in which contradictions were rather remarkably at home. Erect and slender, but as strong as he was straight, he was set up, as the phrase is, like a soldier, and yet finished, in certain details--matters of expression and suggestion only indeed--like a man in whom sensibility had been recklessly cultivated. He was hard and fine, just as he was sharp and gentle, just as he was frank and shy, just as he was serious and young, just as he looked, though you could never have imitated it, distinctly “kept up” and yet considerably reduced. His features were thoroughly regular, but his complete shaving might have been designed to show that they were, after all, not absurd. The face Mr. Prodmore offered him fairly glowed, on this new showing, with instant pride of possession, and there was that in Captain Yule’s whole air which justified such a sentiment without consciously rewarding it. “Ah, surely,” said the elder man, “my presence is not without a motive!” “It’s just the motive,” Captain Yule returned, “that makes me wince at it! Certainly I’ve no illusions,” he added, “about the ground of our meeting. Your thorough knowledge of what you’re about has placed me at your mercy--you hold me in the hollow of your hand.” It was vivid in every inch that Mr. Prodmore’s was a nature to expand in the warmth, or even in the chill, of any tribute to his financial subtlety. “Well, I won’t, on my side, deny that when, in general, I go in deep I don’t go in for nothing. I make it pay double!” he smiled. “You make it pay so well--‘double’ surely doesn’t do you justice!--that, if I’ve understood you, you can do quite as you like with this preposterous place. Haven’t you brought me down exactly that I may _see_ you do it?” “I’ve certainly brought you down that you may open your eyes!” This, apparently, however, was not what Mr. Prodmore himself had arrived to do with his own. These fine points of expression literally contracted with intensity. “Of course, you know, you can always clear the property. You can pay off the mortgages.” Captain Yule, by this time, had, as he had not done at first, looked up and down, round about and well over the scene, taking in, though at a mere glance, it might have seemed, more particularly, the row, high up, of strenuous ancestors. But Mr. Prodmore’s last words rang none the less on his ear, and he met them with mild amusement. “Pay off----? What can I pay off with?” “You can always raise money.” “What can I raise it on?” Mr. Prodmore looked massively gay. “On your great political future.” “Oh, I’ve not taken--for the short run at least--the lucrative line,” the young man said, “and I know what you think of _that_.”