Mr. Prodmore gave a quick, strained smile. "You wouldn't be so shockingly rude!"
"Why not—if I'm a firebrand and a keeper of low company and a general nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might very well be the least!"
This was put with such emphasis that Mr. Prodmore was for a moment arrested. He could stop very short, however, and yet talk as still going. "How do you know, if you haven't compared them? It's just to make the comparison—in all the proper circumstances—that you're here at this hour." He took, with a large, though vague, exhibitory gesture, a few turns about. "Now that you stretch yourself—for an hour's relaxation and rocked, as it were, by my friendly hand—in the ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of parting with such a venerable family relic?"
It was evident that, as he decorously embraced the scene, the young man, in spite of this dissuasive tone, was entertaining ideas. It might have appeared at the moment to a spectator in whom fancy was at all alert that the place, becoming in a manner conscious of the question, felt itself on its honour, and that its honour could make no compromise. It met Clement Yule with no gri-
