Clement Yule remained grave. “I shouldn’t have the face to charge you a rent that would make it worth one’s while, and I think even you, dear lady”--his voice just trembled as he risked that address--“wouldn’t have the face to offer me one.” He paused, but something in his aspect and manner checked in her now any impulse to read his meaning too soon. “My lovely inheritance is Dead Sea fruit. It’s mortgaged for all it’s worth and I haven’t the means to pay the interest. If by a miracle I could scrape the money together, it would leave me without a penny to live on.” He puffed his cigarette profusely. “So if I find the old home at last--I lose it by the same luck!” Mrs. Gracedew had hung upon his words, and she seemed still to wait, in visible horror, for something that would improve on them. But when she had to take them for his last, “I never heard of anything so awful!” she broke out. “Do you mean to say you can’t arrange----?” “Oh, yes,” he promptly replied, “an arrangement--if that be the name to give it--has been definitely proposed to me.” “What’s the matter, then?”--she had dropped into relief. “For heaven’s sake, you poor thing, definitely accept it!” He laughed, though with little joy, at her sweet simplifications. “I’ve made up my mind in the last quarter of an hour that I can’t. It’s such a peculiar case.” Mrs. Gracedew frankly wondered; her bias was clearly sceptical. “_How_ peculiar----?” He found the measure difficult to give. “Well--more peculiar than most cases.” Still she was not satisfied. “More peculiar than mine?” “Than yours?”--Clement Yule knew nothing about that. Something, at this, in his tone, his face--it might have been his “British” density--seemed to pull her up. “I forgot--you don’t know mine. No matter. What _is_ yours?” He took a few steps in thought. “Well, the fact that I’m asked to change.” “To change what?” He wondered how he could put it; then at last, on his own side, simplified. “My attitude.” “Is that all?”--she was relieved again. “Well, you’re not a statue.” “No, I’m not a statue; but on the other hand, don’t you see? I’m not a windmill.” There was good-humour, none the less, in his rigour. “The mortgages I speak of have all found their way, like gregarious silly sheep, into the hands of one person--a devouring wolf, a very rich, a very sharp man of money. He holds me in this manner at his mercy. He consents to make things comfortable for me, but he requires that, in return, I shall do something for him that--don’t you know?--rather sticks in my crop.” It appeared on this light showing to stick for a moment even in Mrs. Gracedew’s. “Do you mean something wrong?” He had not a moment’s hesitation. “Exceedingly so!” She turned it over as if pricing a Greek Aldus. “Anything immoral?” “Yes--I may literally call it immoral.” She courted, however, frankly enough, the strict truth. “Too bad to tell?”