She broke away, but he broke faster, and once more, nearer the door, he had barred her escape. “Just one little moment, please. If you won’t tell me your own terms, you must at least tell me Prodmore’s.” Ah, the fiend--she could never squeeze past _that_! All she could do, for the instant, was to reverberate foolishly “Prodmore’s?” But there was nothing foolish, at last, about _him_. “How you did it--how you managed him.” His feet were firm while he waited, though he had to wait some time. “You bought him out?” She made less of it than, clearly, he had ever heard made of a stroke of business; it might have been a case of his owing her ninepence. “I bought him out.” He wanted at least the exact sum. “For how much?” Her silence seemed to say that she had made no note of it, but his pressure only increased. “I really must know.” She continued to try to treat it as if she had merely paid for his cab--she put even what she could of that suggestion into a tender, helpless, obstinate headshake. “You shall never know!” The only thing his own manner met was the obstinacy. “I’ll get it from _him_!” She repeated her headshake, but with a world of sadness added, “Get it if you can!” He looked into her eyes now as if it was the sadness that struck him most. “He won’t say, because he _did_ you?” They showed each other, on this, the least separated faces yet. “He’ll never, never say.” The confidence in it was so tender that it sounded almost like pity, and the young man took it up with all the flush of the sense that pity could be but for _him_. This sense broke full in her face. “The scoundrel!” “Not a bit!” she returned, with equal passion--“I was only too clever for him!” The thought of it was again an exaltation in which she pushed her friend aside. “So let me go!” The push was like a jar that made the vessel overflow, and he was before her now as if he stretched across the hall. “With the heroic view of your power and the barren beauty of your sacrifice? You pour out money, you move a mountain, and to let you ‘go,’ to close the door fast behind you, is all I can figure out to do for you?” His emotion trembled out of him with the stammer of a new language, but it was as if in a minute or two he had thrown over all consciousness. “You’re the most generous--you’re the noblest of women! The wonderful chance that brought you here----!” His own arm was grasped now--she knew better than he about the wonderful chance. “It brought _you_ at the same happy hour! I’ve done what I liked,” she went on very simply; “and the only way to thank me is to believe it.” “You’ve done it for a proud, poor man”--his answer was quite as direct. “He has nothing--in the light of such a magic as yours--either to give or to hope; but you’ve made him, in a little miraculous hour, think of you----”