He stumbled with the rush of things, and if silence can, in its way, be active, there was a collapse too, for an instant, on her closed lips. These lips, however, she at last opened. “How have I made him think of me?” “As he has thought of no other woman!” He had personal possession of her now, and it broke, as he pressed her, as he pleaded, the helpless fall of his eloquence. “Mrs. Gracedew--don’t leave me.” He jerked his head passionately at the whole place and the yellow afternoon. “If you made me care----” “It was surely that you had made _me_ first!” She laughed, and her laugh disengaged her, so that before he could reply she had again put space between them. He accepted the space now--he appeared so sure of his point. “Then let me go on caring. When I asked you awhile back for some possible adjustment to my new source of credit, you simply put off the question--told me I must trust to time for it. Well,” said Clement Yule, “I’ve trusted to time so effectually that ten little minutes have made me find it. I’ve found it because I’ve so quickly found _you_. May I, Mrs. Gracedew, keep _all_ that I’ve found? I offer you in return the only thing I have to give--I offer you my hand and my life.” She held him off, across the hall, for a time almost out of proportion to the previous wait he had just made so little of. Then at last also, when she answered, it might have passed for a plea for further postponement, even for a plea for mercy. “Ah, Captain Yule----!” But she turned suddenly off: the flower had been nipped in the bud by the re-entrance of Chivers, at whom his master veritably glowered. “What the devil is it?” The old man showed the shock, but he had his duty. “Another party.” Mrs. Gracedew, at this, wheeled round. “The ‘party up’!” It brought back her voice--indeed, all her gaiety. And her gaiety was always determinant. “Show them in.” Clement Yule’s face fell while Chivers proceeded to obey. “You’ll _have_ them?” he wailed across the hall. “Ah! mayn’t I be proud of my house?” she tossed back at him. At this, radiant, he had rushed at her. “Then you accept----?” Her raised hand checked him. “Hush!”