This met, moreover, the perception of the gentleman in the green necktie. “It’s unique!” They all, in fact, demonstratively--almost vociferously now--caught the point. Mrs. Gracedew, finding herself so sustained, and still with her eyes on the lawful heirs, put it yet more strongly. “It’s worth anything you like.” What was this but precisely what Mr. Prodmore had always striven to prove? “Anything you like!” he richly reverberated. The pleasant discussion and the general interest seemed to bring them all together. “Twenty thousand now?” one of the gentlemen from Gossage archly inquired--a very young gentleman with an almost coaxing voice, who blushed immensely as soon as he had spoken. He blushed still more at the way Mrs. Gracedew faced him. “I wouldn’t _look_ at twenty thousand!” Mr. Prodmore, on the other hand, was proportionately uplifted. “She wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!” he announced with intensity to the Captain. The visitor who had been the first to speak gave a shrewder guess. “Thirty, then, as it stands?” Mrs. Gracedew looked more and more responsible; she communed afresh with the place; but she too evidently had her conscience. “It would be giving it away!” Mr. Prodmore, at this, could scarcely contain himself. “It would be giving it away!” The second speaker had meanwhile conceived the design of showing that, though still crimson, he was not ashamed. “You’d hold out for forty----?” Mrs. Gracedew required a minute to answer--a very marked minute during which the whole place, pale old portraits and lurking old echoes and all, might have made you feel how much depended on her; to the degree that the consciousness in her face became finally a reason for her not turning it to Gossage. “Fifty thousand, Captain Yule, is what I think I should propose.” If the place had seemed to listen it might have been the place that, in admiring accents from the gentleman with the green tie, took up the prodigious figure. “Fifty thousand pound!” It was echoed in a high note from the lady he had previously addressed. “Fifty thousand!” Yet it was Mr. Prodmore who caught it up loudest and appeared to make it go furthest. “Fifty thousand--fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew had put him in such spirits that he found on the spot, indicating to her his young friend, both the proper humour and the proper rigour for any question of what anyone might “propose.” “He’ll never part with the dear old home!”