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386 She fully assented, "I go right back." As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. "Farewell!"

She broke away, but he broke faster, and once more, nearer the door, he had barred her escape. "Just one little moment, please. If you won't tell me your own terms, you must at least tell me Prodmore's."

Ah, the fiend—she could never squeeze past that! All she could do, for the instant, was to reverberate foolishly "Prodmore's?"

But there was nothing foolish, at last, about him. "How you did it—how you managed him." His feet were firm while he waited, though he had to wait some time. "You bought him out?"

She made less of it than, clearly, he had ever heard made of a stroke of business; it might have been a case of his owing her ninepence. "I bought him out."

He wanted at least the exact sum. "For how much?" Her silence seemed to say that she had made no note of it, but his pressure only increased. "I really must know."

She continued to try to treat it as if she had merely paid for his cab—she put even what she could of that suggestion into a tender, helpless, obstinate headshake. "You shall never know!"