“Well, it’s just ‘practically’ that I can’t!” “I didn’t know that then,” said Mrs. Gracedew. “You didn’t tell me.” He passed, with an approach to a grimace, his hand over the back of his head. “I felt a delicacy!” “I didn’t even know _that_.” She spoke it almost sadly. “It didn’t strike you that I might?” She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t quarrel with me about it _now_!” “Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement. She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no delicacy. Cora told me.” Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know----?” “She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused you.” The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show--by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done--that he felt no personal wound. “Do you call that quite right?” Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For _her_--yes; and for Prodmore.” “Oh, for Prodmore”--his laugh grew more grim--“with all my heart!” This, then,--her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,--was all she meant. “To stay at your post--_that_ was the way I showed you.” He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady----?” “If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?” Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost terrible. She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender _yours_?” “I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.” Oh that, she let him see,--even though with his continued grasp he might hurt her,--had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a stride--like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other bank--that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner, my tenant.” “But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on what terms?” “Oh, _any_ terms--choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to free her arm--gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to let her go: “You can write me about them.” He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?” She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. “Farewell!”