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366 fair—that it was not for her. "I'm in to the tune of fifty thousand."

She was silent, on this announcement, so long that he once more faced her; but if what he showed her in doing so at last made her speak, it also took the life from her tone. "That's a great deal of money, Mr. Prodmore."

The tone didn't matter, but only the truth it expressed, which he so thoroughly liked to hear. "So I've often had occasion to say to myself!"

"If it's a large sum for you, then," said Mrs. Gracedew, "it's a still larger one for me." She sank into a chair with a vague melancholy; such a mass loomed huge, and she sat down before it as a solitary herald, resigning himself with a sigh to wait, might have leaned against a tree before a besieged city. "We women"—she wished to conciliate—"have more modest ideas."

But Mr. Prodmore would scarce condescend to parley. "Is it as a 'modest idea' that you describe your extraordinary intrusion?"

His question scarce reached her; she was so lost for the moment in the sense of innocent community with her sex. "I mean I think we measure things often rather more exactly."

There would have been no doubt of Mr.