The Two Magics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898)/Covering End/Chapter 4

by Henry James

IV

The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in time to avert an awkwardness. "How do you come to know so much about my house?"

She was as distinctly not grave. "How do you come to know so little?"

"It's not my fault," he said very gently. "A particular combination of misfortunes has forbidden me, till this hour, to come within a mile of it."

These words evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old butler—the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but mark the romantic reality? "Why, you poor thing!"—she came toward him on the weary road. "Now that you've got here I hope at least you'll stay." Their intercourse must pitch itself—so far as she was concerned—in some key that would make up for things. "Do make yourself comfortable. Don't mind me."

Yule looked a shade less serious. "That's exactly what I wanted to say to you!"

She was struck with the way it came in. "Well, if you had been haughty, I shouldn't have been quite crushed, should I?"

The young man's gravity, at this, completely yielded. "I'm never haughty—oh, no!"

She seemed even more amused. "Fortunately then, as I'm never crushed. I don't think," she added, "that I'm really as crushable as you."

The smile with which he received this failed to conceal completely that it was something of a home thrust. "Aren't we really all crushable—by the right thing?"

She considered a little. "Don't you mean rather by the wrong?"

He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being extraordinary. "Are you sure we always know them apart?"

She weighed the responsibility. "I always do. Don't you?"

"Not quite every time!"

"Oh," she replied, "I don't think, thank goodness, we have positively 'every time' to distinguish."

"Yet we must always act," he objected.

She turned this over; then with her wonderful living look, "I'm glad to hear it," she exclaimed, "because, I fear, I always do! You'll certainly think," she added with more gravity, that I've taken a line today!"

"Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes—you do seem in possession!"

"You don't!" she honestly answered; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: "You don't comfortably look it, I mean. You don't look"—she was very serious—"as I want you to."

It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. "How do you 'want' me to look?"

She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. "When you look at me, you're all right!" she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. "Look at that chimneypiece."

"Well———?" he inquired as his eyes came back from it.

"You mean to say it isn't lovely?"

He returned to it without passion—gave a vivid sign of mere disability. "I'm sure I don't know. I don't mean to say anything. I'm a rank outsider."

It had an instant effect on her—she almost pounced upon him. "Then you must let me put you up!"

"Up to what?"

"Up to everything!"—his levity added to her earnestness. "You were smoking when you came in," she said as she glanced about. "Where's your cigarette?"

The young man appreciatively produced another. "I thought perhaps I mightn't—here."

"You may everywhere."

He bent his head to the information. "Everywhere."

She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon it. "It's a rule of the house!"

He took in the place with greater pleasure. "What delightful rules!"

"How could such a house have any others?"—she was already launched again in her brave relation to it. "I may go up just once more—mayn't I—to the long gallery?"

How could he tell? "The long gallery?"

With an added glow she remembered. "I forgot you've never seen it. Why, it's the leading thing about you!" She was full, on the spot, of the pride of showing it. "Come right up!"

Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. "There's a party up."

She remembered afresh. "So we must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery's the principal thing I came over for."

She was strangest of all when she explained. "Where in heaven's name did you come over from?"

"Missoura Top, where I'm building—just in this style. I came for plans and ideas," Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. "I felt I must look right at you."

"But what did you know about us?"

She kept it a moment as if it were too good to give him all at once. "Everything!"

He seemed indeed almost afraid to touch it. "At 'Missoura Top'?"

"Why not? It's a growing place—forty thousand the last census." She hesitated; then as if her warrant should be slightly more personal: "My husband left it to me."

The young man presently changed his posture. "You're a widow?"

Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. "A very lone woman." Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. "My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture."

Yule's innocence made a movement. "Mine?"

Her smile reassured him; she nodded toward the main entrance. "A water colour I chanced on in Boston."

"In Boston?"

She stared. "Haven't you heard of Boston either?"

"Yes—but what has Boston heard of me?"

"It wasn't 'you,' unfortunately—it was your divine south front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up—in the books."

He appeared, however, rather comically, but half to make it out, or to gather at any rate that there was even more of it than he feared. "Are we in the books?"

"Did you never discover it?" Before his blankness, the dim apprehension in his fine amused and troubled face of how much there was of it, her frank, gay concern for him sprang again to the front. "Where in heaven's name, Captain Yule, have you come over from?"

He looked at her very kindly, but as if scarce expecting her to follow. "The East End of London."

She had followed perfectly, he saw the next instant, but she had by no means equally accepted. "What were you doing there?"

He could only put it, though a little over-consciously, very simply. "Working, you see. When I left the army—it was much too slow, unless one was personally a whirlwind of war—I began to make out that, for a fighting man———"

"There's always," she took him up, "somebody or other to go for?"

He considered her, while he smoked, with more confidence; as if she might after all understand. "The enemy, yes—everywhere in force. I went for him: misery and ignorance and vice—injustice and privilege and wrong. Such as you see me———"

"You're a rabid reformer?"—she understood beautifully. "I wish we had you at Missoura Top!"

He literally, for a moment, in the light of her beauty and familiarity, appeared to measure his possible use there; then, looking round him again, announced with a sigh that, predicament for predicament, his own would do. "I fear my work is nearer home. I hope," he continued, "since you're so good as to seem to care, to perform a part of that work in the next House of Commons. My electors have wanted me———"

"And you've wanted them" she lucidly put in, "and that has been why you couldn't come down."

"Yes, for all this last time. And before that, from my childhood up, there was another reason." He took a few steps away and brought it out as rather a shabby one. "A family feud."

She proved to be quite delighted with it. "Oh, I'm so glad—I hoped I'd strike a 'feud'! That rounds it off, and spices it up, and, for the heartbreak with which I take leave of you, just neatly completes the fracture!" Her reference to her going seemed suddenly, on this, to bring her back to a sense of proportion and propriety, and she glanced about once more for some wrap or reticule. This, in turn, however, was another recall. "Must I really wait—to go up?"

He had watched her movement, had changed colour, had shifted his place, had tossed away, plainly unwitting, a cigarette but half smoked; and now he stood in her path to the staircase as if, still unsatisfied, he abruptly sought a way to turn the tables. "Only till you tell me this: if you absolutely meant, awhile ago, that this old thing is so precious."

She met his doubt with amazement and his density with compassion. "Do you literally need I should say it? Can you stand here and not feel it?" If he had the misfortune of bandaged eyes, she could at least rejoice in her own vision, which grew intenser with her having to speak for it. She spoke as with a new rush of her impression. "It's a place to love———" Yet to say the whole thing was not easy.

"To love———?" he impatiently insisted.

"Well, as you'd love a person!" If that was saying the whole thing, saying the whole thing could only be to go. A sound from the "party up" came down at that moment, and she took it so clearly as a call that, for a sign of separation, she passed straight to the stairs. "Good-bye!"

The young man let her reach the foot, but then, though the greatest width of the hall now divided them, spoke, anxiously and nervously, as if the point she had just made brought them still more together. "I think I 'feel' it, you know; but it's simply you—your presence, as I may say, and the remarkable way you put it—that make me. I'm afraid that in your absence———" He struck a match to smoke again.

It gave her time apparently to make out something to pause for. "In my absence?"

He lit his cigarette. "I may come back———"

"Come back?" she took him almost sharply up. "I should like to see you not!"

He smoked a moment. "I mean to my old idea———"

She had quite turned round on him now. "Your old idea———?"

He faced her over the width still between them. "Well—that one could give it up."

Her stare, at this, fairly filled the space. "Give up Covering? How in the world—or why?"

"Because I can't afford to keep it."

It brought her straight back, but only halfway: she pulled up short as at a flash. "Can't you let it?"

Again he smoked before answering. "Let it to you?"

She gave a laugh, and her laugh brought her nearer. "I'd take it in a minute!"

Clement Yule remained grave. "I shouldn't have the face to charge you a rent that would make it worth one's while, and I think even you, dear lady"—his voice just trembled as he risked that address—"wouldn't have the face to offer me one." He paused, but something in his aspect and manner checked in her now any impulse to read his meaning too soon. "My lovely inheritance is Dead Sea fruit. It's mortgaged for all it's worth and I haven't the means to pay the interest. If by a miracle I could scrape the money together, it would leave me without a penny to live on." He puffed his cigarette profusely. "So if I find the old home at last—I lose it by the same luck!"

Mrs. Gracedew had hung upon his words, and she seemed still to wait, in visible horror, for something that would improve on them. But when she had to take them for his last, "I never heard of anything so awful!" she broke out. "Do you mean to say you can't arrange———?"

"Oh, yes," he promptly replied, "an arrangement—if that be the name to give it—has been definitely proposed to me."

"What's the matter, then?"—she had dropped into relief. "For heaven's sake, you poor thing, definitely accept it!"

He laughed, though with little joy, at her sweet simplifications. "I've made up my mind in the last quarter of an hour that I can't. It's such a peculiar case."

Mrs. Gracedew frankly wondered; her bias was clearly sceptical. "How peculiar———?"

He found the measure difficult to give. "Well—more peculiar than most cases."

Still she was not satisfied. "More peculiar than mine?"

"Than yours?"—Clement Yule knew nothing about that.

Something, at this, in his tone, his face—it might have been his "British" density—seemed to pull her up. "I forgot you don't know mine. No matter. What is yours?"

He took a few steps in thought. "Well, the fact that I'm asked to change."

"To change what?"

He wondered how he could put it; then at last, on his own side, simplified. "My attitude."

"Is that all?"—she was relieved again. "Well, you're not a statue."

"No, I'm not a statue; but on the other hand, don't you see? I'm not a windmill." There was good-humour, none the less, in his rigour. "The mortgages I speak of have all found their way, like gregarious silly sheep, into the hands of one person—a devouring wolf, a very rich, a very sharp man of money. He holds me in this manner at his mercy. He consents to make things comfortable for me, but he requires that, in return, I shall do something for him that—don't you know?—rather sticks in my crop."

It appeared on this light showing to stick for a moment even in Mrs. Gracedew's. "Do you mean something wrong?"

He had not a moment's hesitation. "Exceedingly so!"

She turned it over as if pricing a Greek Aldus. "Anything immoral?"

"Yes—I may literally call it immoral."

She courted, however, frankly enough, the strict truth. "Too bad to tell?"

He indulged in another pensive fidget, then left her to judge. "He wants me to give up———" Yet again he faltered.

"To give up what?" What could it be, she appeared to ask, that was barely nameable?

He quite blushed to her indeed as he came to the point. "My fundamental views."

She was disappointed—she had waited for more. "Nothing but them?"

He met her with astonishment. "Surely they're quite enough, when one has unfortunately"—he rather ruefully smiled—"so very many!"

She laughed aloud; this was frankly so odd a plea. "Well, I've a neat collection too, but I'd 'swap,' as they say in the West, the whole set———!" She looked about the hall for something of equivalent price; after which she pointed, as it caught her eye, to the great cave of the fireplace. "I'd take that set!"

The young man scarcely followed. "The fire-irons?"

"For the whole fundamental lot!" She gazed with real yearning at the antique group. "They're three hundred years old. Do you mean to tell me your wretched 'views'———?"

"Have anything like that age? No, thank God," Clement Yule laughed, "my views— wretched as you please!—are quite in their prime! They're a hungry little family that has got to be fed. They keep me awake at night."

"Then you must make up your sleep!" Her impatience grew with her interest. "Listen to me!"

"That would scarce be the way!" he returned. But he added more sincerely: "You must surely see a fellow can't chuck his politics."

"'Chuck' them———?"

"Well—sacrifice them."

"I'd sacrifice mine," she cried, "for that old fire-back with your arms!" He glanced at the object in question, but with such a want of intelligence that she visibly resented it. "See how it has stood!"

"See how I've stood!" he answered with spirit. "I've glowed with a hotter fire than anything in any chimney, and the warmth and light I diffuse have attracted no little attention. How can I consent to reduce them to the state of that desolate hearth?"

His companion, freshly struck with the fine details of the desolation, had walked over to the chimney-corner, where, lost in her deeper impression, she lingered and observed. At last she turned away with her impatience controlled. "It's magnificent!"

"The fire-back?"

"Everything—everywhere. I don't understand your haggling."

He hesitated. "That's because you're ignorant." Then seeing in the light of her eye that he had applied to her the word in the language she least liked, he hastened to attenuate. "I mean of what's behind my reserves."

She was silent in a way that made their talk more of a discussion than if she had spoken. "What is behind them?" she presently asked.

"Why, my whole political history. Everything I've said, everything I've done. My scorching addresses and letters, reproduced in all the papers. I needn't go into details, but I'm a pure, passionate, pledged Radical."

Mrs. Gracedew looked him full in the face. "Well, what if you are?"

He broke into mirth at her tone. "Simply this—that I can't therefore, from one day to the other, pop up at Gossage in the purple pomp of the opposite camp. There's a want of transition. It may be timid of me—it may be abject. But I can't."

If she was not yet prepared to contest she was still less prepared to surrender it, and she confined herself for the instant to smoothing down with her foot the corner of an old rug. "Have you thought very much about it?"

He was vague. "About what?"

"About what Mr. Prodmore wants you to do."

He flushed up. "Oh, then, you know it's he?"

"I'm not," she said, still gravely enough, "of an intelligence absolutely infantile."

"You're the cleverest Tory I've ever met!" he laughed. "I didn't mean to mention my friend's name, but since you've done so———!" He gave up with a shrug his scruple.

Oh, she had already cleared the ground of it! "It's he who's the devouring wolf? It's he who holds your mortgages?"

The very lucidity of her interest just checked his assent. "He holds plenty of others, and he treats me very handsomely."

She showed of a sudden an inconsequent face. "Do you call that handsome—such a condition?"

He shed surprise. "Why, I thought it was just the condition you could meet."

She measured her inconsistency, but was not abashed. "We're not talking of what I can meet." Yet she found also a relief in dropping the point. "Why doesn't he stand himself?"

"Well, like other devouring wolves, he's not personally adored."

"Not even," she asked, "when he offers such liberal terms?"

Clement Yule had to explain. "I dare say he doesn't offer them to everyone."

"Only to you?"—at this she quite sprang. "You are personally adored; you will be still more if you stand; and that, you poor lamb, is why he wants you!"

The young man, obviously pleased to find her after all more at one with him, accepted gracefully enough the burden her sympathy imposed. "I'm the bearer of my name, I'm the representative of my family; and to my family and my name—since you've led me to it—this countryside has been for generations indulgently attached."

She listened to him with a sentiment in her face that showed how now, at last, she felt herself deal with the lawful heir. She seemed to perceive it with a kind of passion. "You do of course what you will with the countryside!"

Yes"—he went with her—"if we do it as genuine Yules. I'm obliged of course to grant you that your genuine Yule's a Tory of Tories. It's Mr. Prodmore's belief that I should carry Gossage in that character, but in that character only. They won't look at me in any other."

It might have taxed a spectator to say in what character Mrs. Gracedew, on this, for a little, considered him. "Don't be too sure of people's not looking at you!"

He blushed again, but he laughed. "We must leave out my personal beauty."

"We can't!" she replied with decision. "Don't we take in Mr. Prodmore's?"

Captain Yule was not prepared. "You call him beautiful?"

"Hideous." She settled it; then pursued her investigation. "What's the extraordinary interest that he attaches———?"

"To the return of a Tory?" Here the young man was prepared. "Oh, his desire is born of his fear—his terror on behalf of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal, with a quite colossal 'P.' He has a great deal of that article, and very little of anything else."

Mrs. Gracedew, accepting provisionally his demonstration, had one of her friendly recalls. "Do you call that nice daughter 'very little'?"

The young man looked quite at a loss. "Is she very big? I really didn't notice her—and moreover she's just a part of the Property. He thinks things are going too far."

She sat straight down on a stiff chair; on which, with high distinctness: "Well, they are!"

He stood before her in the discomposure of her again thus appearing to fail him. "Aren't you then a lover of justice?"

"A passionate one!" She sat there as upright as if she held the scales. "Where's the justice of your losing this house?" Generous as well as strenuous, all her fairness thrown out by her dark old high-backed seat, she put it to him as from the judicial bench. "To keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!"

The odd face he made at it might have betrayed a man dazzled. "As a renegade?"

"As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything else?" She had already arranged it all. "You must close with Mr. Prodmore—you must stand in the Tory interest." She hung fire a moment; then as she got up: "If you will, I'll conduct your canvass!"

He stared at the distracting picture. "That puts the temptation high!"

But she brushed the mere picture away. "Ah, don't look at me as if I were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home, and feel all its gathered memories. Do you want to know what they do to me?" She took the survey herself again, as if to be really sure. "They speak to me for Mr. Prodmore."

He followed with a systematic docility the direction of her eyes, but as if with the result only of its again coming home to him that there was no accounting for what things might do. "Well, there are others than these, you know," he good-naturedly pleaded—"things for which I've spoken, repeatedly and loudly, to others than you." The very manner of his speaking on such occasions appeared, for that matter, now to come back to him. "One's 'human home' is all very well, but the rest of one's humanity is better!" She gave, at this, a droll soft wail; she turned impatiently away. "I see you're disgusted with me, and I'm sorry; but one must take one's self as circumstances and experience have made one, and its not my fault, don't you know? if they've made me a very modern man. I see something else in the world than the beauty of old show-houses and the glory of old show-families. There are thousands of people in England who can show no houses at all, and I don't feel it utterly shameful to share their poor fate!"

She had moved away with impatience, and it was the advantage of this for her that the back she turned prevented him from seeing how intently she listened. She seemed to continue to listen even after he had stopped; but if that gave him a sense of success, he might have been checked by the way she at last turned round with a sad and beautiful headshake. "We share the poor fate of humanity whatever we do, and we do something to help and console when we've something precious to show. What on earth is more precious than what the ages have slowly wrought? They've trusted us, in such a case, to keep it—to do something, in our turn, for them." She shone out at him as if her contention had the evidence of the noonday sun, and yet in her generosity she superabounded and explained. "It's such a virtue, in anything, to have lasted; it's such an honour, for anything, to have been spared. To all strugglers from the wreck of time hold out a pitying hand!"

Yule, on this argument,—of a strain which even a good experience of debate could scarce have prepared him to meet,—had not a congruous rejoinder absolutely pat, and his hesitation unfortunately gave him time to see how soon his companion made out that what had touched him most in it was her particular air in presenting it. She would manifestly have preferred he should have been floored by her mere moral reach; yet he was aware that his own made no great show as he took refuge in general pleasantry. "What a plea for looking backward, dear lady, to come from Missoura Top!"

"We're making a Past at Missoura Top as fast as ever we can, and I should like to see you lay your hand on an hour of the one we've made! It's a tight fit, as yet, I grant," she said, "and that's just why I like, in yours, to find room, don't you see? to turn round. You're in it, over here, and you can't get out; so just make the best of that and treat the thing as part of the fun!"

"The whole of the fun, to me," the young man replied, "is in hearing you defend it! It's like your defending hereditary gout or chronic rheumatism and sore throat—the things I feel aching in every old bone of these walls and groaning in every old draught that, I'm sure, has for centuries blown through them."

Mrs. Gracedew looked as if no woman could be shaken who was so prepared to be just all round. "If there be aches—there may be—you're here to soothe them, and if there be draughts—there must be!—you're here to stop them up. And do you know what I'm here for? If I've come so far and so straight, I've almost wondered myself. I've felt with a kind of passion—but now I see why I've felt." She moved about the hall with the excitement of this perception, and, separated from him at last by a distance across which he followed her discovery with a visible suspense, she brought out the news. "I'm here for an act of salvation—I'm here to avert a sacrifice!"

So they stood a little, with more, for the minute, passing between them than either really could say. She might have flung down a glove that he decided on the whole, passing his hand over his head as the seat of some confusion, not to pick up. Again, but flushed as well as smiling, he sought the easiest cover. "You're here, I think, madam, to be a memory for all my future!"

Well, she was willing, she showed as she came nearer, to take it, at the worst, for that. "You'll be one for mine, if I can see you by that hearth. Why do you make such a fuss about changing your politics? If you'd come to Missoura Top, you'd change them quick enough!" Then, as she saw further and struck harder, her eyes grew deep, her face even seemed to pale, and she paused, splendid and serious, with the force of her plea. "What do politics amount to, compared with religions? Parties and programmes come and go, but a duty like this abides. There's nothing you can break with"—she pressed him closer, ringing out—"that would be like breaking here. The very words are violent and ugly—as much a sacrilege as if you had been trusted with the key of the temple. This is the temple—don't profane it! Keep up the old altar kindly—you can't set up a new one as good. You must have beauty in your life, don't you see?—that's the only way to make sure of it for the lives of others. Keep leaving it to them, to all the poor others," she went on with her bright irony, "and heaven only knows what will become of it! Does it take one of us to feel that?—to preach you the truth? Then it's good, Captain Yule, we come right over—just to see, you know, what you may happen to be about. We know," she went on while her sense of proportion seemed to play into her sense of humour, "what we haven't got, worse luck; so that if you've happily got it you've got it also for us. You've got it in trust, you see, and oh! we have an eye on you. You've had it so for me, all these dear days that I've been drinking it in, that, to be grateful, I've wanted regularly to do something." With which, as if in the rich confidence of having convinced him, she came so near as almost to touch him. "Tell me now I shall have done it—I shall have kept you at your post!"

If he moved, on this, immediately further, it was with the oddest air of seeking rather to study her remarks at his ease than to express an independence of them. He kept, to this end, his face averted—he was so completely now in intelligent possession of her own. The sacrifice in question carried him even to the door of the court, where he once more stood so long engaged that the persistent presentation of his back might at last have suggested either a confession or a request.

Mrs. Gracedew, meanwhile, a little spent with her sincerity, seated herself again in the great chair, and if she sought, visibly enough, to read a meaning into his movement, she had as little triumph for one possible view of it as she had resentment for the other. The possibility that he yielded left her after all as vague in respect to a next step as the possibility that he merely wished to get rid of her. The moments elapsed without her abdicating; and indeed when he finally turned round his expression was an equal check to any power to feel she might have won. "You have," he queerly smiled at her, "a standpoint quite your own and a style of eloquence that the few scraps of parliamentary training I've picked up don't seem at all to fit me to deal with. Of course I don't pretend, you know, that I don't care for Covering."

That, at all events, she could be glad to hear, if only perhaps for the tone in it that was so almost comically ingenuous. But her relief was reasonable and her exultation temperate. "You haven't even seen it yet." She risked, however, a laugh. "Aren't you a bit afraid?"

He took a minute to reply, then replied—as if to make it up—with a grand collapse. "Yes; awfully. But if I am," he hastened in decency to add, "it isn't only Covering that makes me."

This left his friend apparently at a loss. "What else is it?"

"Everything. But it doesn't in the least matter," he loosely pursued. "You may be quite correct. When we talk of the house your voice comes to me somehow as the wind in its old chimneys."

Her amusement distinctly revived. "I hope you don't mean I roar!"

He blushed again; there was no doubt he was confused. "No—nor yet perhaps that you whistle! I don't believe the wind does either, here. It only whispers," he sought gracefully to explain; "and it sighs———"

"And I hope," she broke in, "that it sometimes laughs!"

The sound she gave only made him, as he looked at her, more serious. "Whatever it does, it's all right."

"All right?"—they were sufficiently together again for her to lay her hand straight on his arm. "Then you promise?"

"Promise what?"

He had turned as pale as if she hurt him, and she took her hand away. "To meet Mr. Prodmore."

"Oh, dear, no; not yet!"—he quite recovered himself. "I must wait—I must think."

She looked disappointed, and there was a momentary silence. "When have you to answer him?"

"Oh, he gives me time!" Clement Yule spoke very much as he might have said, "Oh, in two minutes!"

"I wouldn't give you time," Mrs. Gracedew cried with force—"I'd give you a shaking! For God's sake, at any rate"—and she really tried to push him off—"go upstairs!"

"And literally find the dreadful man?" This was so little his personal idea that, distinctly dodging her pressure, he had already reached the safe quarter.

But it befell that at the same moment she saw Cora reappear on the upper landing—a circumstance that promised her a still better conclusion. "He's coming down!"

Cora, in spite of this announcement, came down boldly enough without him and made directly for Mrs. Gracedew, to whom her eyes had attached themselves with an undeviating glare. Her plain purpose of treating this lady as an isolated presence allowed their companion perfect freedom to consider her arrival with sharp alarm. His disconcerted stare seemed for a moment to balance; it wandered, gave a wild glance at the open door, then searched the ascent of the staircase, in which, apparently, it now found a coercion. "I'll go up!" he gasped; and he took three steps at a time.