“Why the devil do you want us?” The question rang out and was truly for the poor lady, as the quick suffusion of her eyes showed, a challenge it would take more time than he left her properly to pick up. He left her in fact no time at all before he went on: “Why the devil did you say you’d offer fifty?” She looked quite wan and seemed to wonder. “_Did_ I say that?” She could only let his challenge lie. “It was a figure of speech!” “Then that’s the kind of figure we’re talking about!” Mr. Prodmore’s sharpness would have struck an auditor as the more effective that, on the heels of this thrust, seeing the ancient butler reappear, he dropped the victim of it as comparatively unimportant and directed his fierceness instantly to Chivers, who mildly gaped at him from the threshold of the court. “Have you seen Miss Prodmore? If you haven’t, find her!” Mrs. Gracedew addressed their visitor in a very different tone, though with the full authority of her benevolence. “You won’t, my dear man.” To Mr. Prodmore also she continued bland. “I happen to know she has gone for a walk.” “A walk--alone?” Mr. Prodmore gasped. “No--not alone.” Mrs. Gracedew looked at Chivers with a vague smile of appeal for help, but he could only give her, from under his bent old brow, the blank decency of his wonder. It seemed to make her feel afresh that she was, after all, alone--so that in her loneliness, which had also its fine sad charm, she risked another brush with their formidable friend. “Cora has gone with Mr. Pegg.” “Pegg has _been_ here?” It was like a splash in a full basin, but she launched the whole craft. “He walked with her from the station.” “When she arrived?” Mr. Prodmore rose like outraged Neptune. “That’s why she was so late?” Mrs. Gracedew assented. “Why I got here first. I get everywhere first!” she bravely laughed. Mr. Prodmore looked round him in purple dismay--it was so clearly a question for him where _he_ should get, and what! “In which direction did they go?” he imperiously asked. His rudeness was too evident to be more than lightly recognised. “I think I must let you ascertain for yourself!” All he could do then was to shout it to Chivers. “Call my carriage, you ass!” After which, as the old man melted into the vestibule, he dashed about blindly for his hat, pounced upon it and seemed, furious but helpless, on the point of hurling it at his contradictress as a gage of battle. “So you abetted and protected this wicked, low intrigue?” She had something in her face now that was indifferent to any violence. “You’re too disappointed to see your real interest: oughtn’t I therefore in common charity to point it out to you?” He faced her question so far as to treat it as one. “What do _you_ know of my disappointment?” There was something in his very harshness that even helped her, for it added at this moment to her sense of making out in his narrowed glare a couple of tears of rage. “I know everything.”