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382 "For me to feel you're here."

"And how long will that take?"

"Well, you think me very fast—but sometimes I'm slow. I told you just now, at any rate," she went on, "that I had arranged you should lose nothing. Is the very next thing I do, then, to make you lose everything?"

"It isn't a question of what I lose," the young man anxiously cried; "it's a question of what I do! What have I done to find it all so plain?" Fate was really—fate reversed, improved, and unnatural—too much for him, and his heated young face showed honest stupefaction. "I haven't lifted a finger. It's you who have done all."

"Yes, but if you're just where you were before, how in the world are you saved?" She put it to him with still superior lucidity.

"By my life's being my own again—to do what I want."

"What you 'want'"—Mrs. Gracedew's handsome uplifted head had it all there, every inch of it—"is to keep your house."

"Ah, but only," he perfectly assented, "if, as you said, you find a way!"

"I have found a way—and there the way is: for me just simply not to touch the place.