Clement Yule might on the other hand, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. "For God's sake," he cried as he circled earnestly round her, "don't go till I can come back to thank you!" He pulled out his watch. "I promised to return immediately to Prodmore."
This completely settled his visitor. "Then don't let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots"--it went almost without saying--"to talk comfortably over."
The young man's embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. "I certainly feel, you know, that I must see him again." He rambled even to the open door and looked with incoherence into the court. "Yes, decidedly, I _must_!"
"Is he out there?" Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.
He turned short round. "No--I left him in the long gallery."
"You _saw_ that, then?"--she flashed back into eagerness. "Isn't it lovely?"
Clement Yule rather wondered. "I didn't notice it. How _could_ I?"
His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. "How _couldn't_ you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!"
He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. "Will you wait for me?"
He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could give him no pledge. Her silence, after a moment, expressed that; but, for a further emphasis, moving away, she sank suddenly into the chair she had already occupied and in which, serious again and very upright, she continued to withhold her promise. "Go up to him!" she simply repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly enough several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her as if he were after all irresolute. He was in fact so much so that, at the sight of her still in her chair and alone by his cold hearth, he descended a few steps again and seemed, with too much decidedly on his mind, on the point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought, figuring him clearly as gone, that at the sound of his return she sprang up with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had paused, still on the ascent and exchanging with her a look to which neither party was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It struck him, without words, at all events, as enough, and he now took his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared. She listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags of the hall, became rapid, though, it may perhaps be added, directed to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and without joy, her course determined by a series of such inward throbs as might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution from sign to sign and from shade to shade. "Why didn't he tell me _all_?--But it was none of my business!--What does he mean to do?--What should he do but what he _has_ done?--And what _can_ he do, when he's so deeply committed, when he's practically engaged, when he's just the same as married--and buried?--The thing for _me_ to 'do' is just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they encumber the numerous fragments--well, of what?"