Mrs. Gracedew, meanwhile, a little spent with her sincerity, seated herself again in the great chair, and if she sought, visibly enough, to read a meaning into his movement, she had as little triumph for one possible view of it as she had resentment for the other. The possibility that he yielded left her after all as vague in respect to a next step as the possibility that he merely wished to get rid of her. The moments elapsed without her abdicating; and indeed when he finally turned round his expression was an equal check to any power to feel she might have won. “You have,” he queerly smiled at her, “a standpoint quite your own and a style of eloquence that the few scraps of parliamentary training I’ve picked up don’t seem at all to fit me to deal with. Of course I don’t pretend, you know, that I don’t _care_ for Covering.” That, at all events, she could be glad to hear, if only perhaps for the tone in it that was so almost comically ingenuous. But her relief was reasonable and her exultation temperate. “You haven’t even seen it yet.” She risked, however, a laugh. “Aren’t you a bit afraid?” He took a minute to reply, then replied--as if to make it up--with a grand collapse. “Yes; awfully. But if I am,” he hastened in decency to add, “it isn’t only Covering that makes me.” This left his friend apparently at a loss. “What else is it?” “Everything. But it doesn’t in the least matter,” he loosely pursued. “You may be quite correct. When we talk of the house your voice comes to me somehow as the wind in its old chimneys.” Her amusement distinctly revived. “I hope you don’t mean I roar!” He blushed again; there was no doubt he was confused. “No--nor yet perhaps that you whistle! I don’t believe the wind does either, here. It only whispers,” he sought gracefully to explain; “and it sighs----” “And I hope,” she broke in, “that it sometimes laughs!” The sound she gave only made him, as he looked at her, more serious. “Whatever it does, it’s all right.” “All right?”--they were sufficiently together again for her to lay her hand straight on his arm. “Then you promise?” “Promise what?” He had turned as pale as if she hurt him, and she took her hand away. “To meet Mr. Prodmore.” “Oh, dear, no; not yet!”--he quite recovered himself. “I must wait--I must think.” She looked disappointed, and there was a momentary silence. “When have you to answer him?” “Oh, he gives me time!” Clement Yule spoke very much as he might have said, “Oh, in two minutes!” “_I_ wouldn’t give you time,” Mrs. Gracedew cried with force--“I’d give you a shaking! For God’s sake, at any rate”--and she really tried to push him off--“go upstairs!” “And literally _find_ the dreadful man?” This was so little his personal idea that, distinctly dodging her pressure, he had already reached the safe quarter. But it befell that at the same moment she saw Cora reappear on the upper landing--a circumstance that promised her a still better conclusion. “He’s coming down!”