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384 Clement Yule fairly gaped. "Then she did know?"

"She knew all; and if her father said she didn't, he simply told you what was not." She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. "It was quite right of her. She would have refused you."

The young man stared. "Oh!" He was quick, however, to show—by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done—that he felt no personal wound. "Do you call that quite right?"

Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. "For her—yes; and for Prodmore."

"Oh, for Prodmore"—his laugh grew more grim—"with all my heart!"

This, then,—her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,—was all she meant. "To stay at your post—that was the way I showed you."

He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. "How can I take any way at all, dear lady?"

"If I only stick here in your path?" She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the