“Why not--if I’m a firebrand and a keeper of low company and a general nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might very well be the least!” This was put with such emphasis that Mr. Prodmore was for a moment arrested. He could stop very short, however, and yet talk as still going. “How do you know, if you haven’t compared them? It’s just to make the comparison--in all the proper circumstances--that you’re here at this hour.” He took, with a large, though vague, exhibitory gesture, a few turns about. “Now that you stretch yourself--for an hour’s relaxation and rocked, as it were, by my friendly hand--in the ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of parting with such a venerable family relic?” It was evident that, as he decorously embraced the scene, the young man, in spite of this dissuasive tone, was entertaining ideas. It might have appeared at the moment to a spectator in whom fancy was at all alert that the place, becoming in a manner conscious of the question, felt itself on its honour, and that its honour could make no compromise. It met Clement Yule with no grimace of invitation, with no attenuation of its rich old sadness. It was as if the two hard spirits, the grim _genius loci_ and the quick modern conscience, stood an instant confronted. “The cradle of my race bears, for me, Mr. Prodmore, a striking resemblance to its tomb.” The sigh that dropped from him, however, was not quite void of tenderness. It might, for that matter, have been a long, sad creak, portending collapse, of some immemorial support of the Yules. “Heavens, how melancholy----!” Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. “Melancholy?”--he just balanced. That well might be, even a little _should_ be--yet agreement might depreciate. “Musty, mouldy;” then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the stuff with which an old chair was covered, “mangy!” Captain Yule responded. “Is this the character throughout?” Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. “You must judge for yourself--you must go over the house.” He hesitated again; then his indecision vanished--the right line was clear. “It does look a bit run down, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do it up for you--neatly: I’ll throw _that_ in!” His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. “Will you put in the electric light?” Mr. Prodmore’s own twinkle--at this touch of a spring he had not expected to work--was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. “Well, if you’ll meet me half-way! We’re dealing here”--he backed up his gravity--“with fancy-values. Don’t you feel,” he appealed, “as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?”