Mrs. Gracedew took it amiably up. “Come back, then; I’m not going.” And there was both dismissal and encouragement in the way that, as on the occasion of the girl’s former retreat, she blew her a familiar kiss. Cora, still with her face to them, waited just enough to show that she took it without a response; then, with a quick turn, dashed out, while Mrs. Gracedew looked at their visitor in vague surprise. “What’s the matter with her?” She had turned away as soon as she spoke, moving as far from him as she had moved a few moments before from Cora. The silence that, as he watched her, followed her question would have been seen by a spectator to be a hard one for either to break. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” he said at last; “I’m afraid I only know what’s the matter with _me_. It will doubtless give you pleasure to learn,” he added, “that I’ve closed with Mr. Prodmore.” It was a speech that, strangely enough, seemed but half to dissipate the hush. Mrs. Gracedew reached the great chimney again; again she stood there with her face averted; and when she finally replied it was in other words than he might have supposed himself naturally to inspire. “I thought you said he gave you time.” “Yes; but you produced just now so deep an effect on me that I thought best not to take any.” He appeared to listen to a sound from above, and, for a moment, under this impulse, his eyes travelled about almost as if he were alone. Then he completed, with deliberation, his statement. “I came upon him right there, and I burnt my ships.” Mrs. Gracedew continued not to meet his face. “You do what he requires?” The young man was markedly, consciously caught. “I do what he requires. I felt the tremendous force of all you said to me.” She turned round on him now, as if perhaps with a slight sharpness, the face of responsibility--even, it might be, of reproach. “So did I--or I shouldn’t have said it!” It was doubtless this element of justification in her tone that drew from him a laugh a tiny trifle dry. “You’re perhaps not aware that you wield an influence of which it’s not too much to say----” But he paused at the important point so long that she took him up. “To say what?” “Well, that it’s practically irresistible!” It sounded a little as if it had not been what he first meant; but it made her, none the less, still graver and just faintly ironical. “You’ve given me the most flattering proof of my influence that I’ve ever enjoyed in my life!” He fixed her very hard, now distinctly so mystified that he could only wonder what different recall of her previous attitude she would have looked for. “This was inevitable, dear madam, from the moment you had converted me--and in about three minutes too!--into the absolute echo of your raptures.” Nothing was, indeed, more extraordinary than her air of having suddenly forgotten them. “My ‘raptures’?” He was amazed. “Why, about my home.”