But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?” He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking----” “Of Gossage? Oh, yes--she has every charm! Good-bye,” said Mrs. Gracedew. He pulled, at this, the longest face, but was kept dumb a moment by the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. It held him helpless, and there was finally real despair in his retarded protest. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?” “You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I done,” she luminously asked, “what I told you I had been so mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed supreme survey the limited character of this errand, which she then in a brisk familiar word expressed to the house itself. “You dear old thing--you’re saved!” Clement Yule might on the other hand, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back to thank you!” He pulled out his watch. “I promised to return immediately to Prodmore.” This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots”--it went almost without saying--“to talk comfortably over.” The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. “I certainly feel, you know, that I must see him again.” He rambled even to the open door and looked with incoherence into the court. “Yes, decidedly, I _must_!” “Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked. He turned short round. “No--I left him in the long gallery.” “You _saw_ that, then?”--she flashed back into eagerness. “Isn’t it lovely?” Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How _could_ I?” His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How _couldn’t_ you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!” He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. “Will you wait for me?”