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248 "You'd care to keep in the really attractive position?"

"Which can never, of course, be anything"—Yule took his friend up again—"but that of waiting quietly."

"Never, never anything!" Mr. Prodmore, most assentingly, banished all other thought. "But I haven't asked you, you know, to make an advance."

"You've only asked me to receive one?"

Mr. Prodmore waited a little. "Well, I've asked you—I asked you a month ago—to think it all over."

"I have thought it all over," Clement Yule said; "and the strange sequel seems to be that my eyes have got accustomed to my darkness. I seem to make out, in the gloom of my meditations, that, at the worst, I can let the whole thing slide."

"The property?"—Mr. Prodmore jerked back as if it were about to start.

"Isn't it the property," his visitor inquired, "that positively throws me up? If I can afford neither to live on it nor to disencumber it, I can at least let it save its own bacon and pay its own debts. I can say to you simply: 'Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take you!'"