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Rh 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?"