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CHAPTER XII

Mrs. Saltram left me drawing my breath more quickly and indeed almost in pain–as if I had just perilously grazed the loss of something precious. I didn’t quite know what it was–it had a shocking resemblance to my honour. The emotion was the livelier surely in that my pulses even yet vibrated to the pleasure with which, the night before, I had rallied to the rare analyst, the great intellectual adventurer and pathfinder. What had dropped from me like a cumbersome garment as Saltram appeared before me in the afternoon on the heath was the disposition to haggle over his value. Hang it, one had to choose, one had to put that value somewhere; so I would put it really high and have done with it. Mrs. Mulville drove in for him at a discreet hour–the earliest she could suppose him to have got up; and I learned that Miss Anvoy would also have come had she not been expecting a visit from Mr. Gravener. I was perfectly mindful that I was under bonds to see this young lady, and also that I had a letter to hand to her; but I took my time, I waited from day to day. I left Mrs. Saltram to deal as her apprehensions should prompt with the Pudneys. I knew at last what I meant–I had ceased to wince at my responsibility. I gave this supreme impression of Saltram time to fade if it would; but it didn’t fade, and, individually, it hasn’t faded even now. During the month that I thus invited myself to stiffen again, Adelaide Mulville, perplexed by my absence, wrote to me to ask why I WAS so stiff. At that season of the year I was usually oftener “with” them. She also wrote that she feared a real estrangement had set in between Mr. Gravener and her sweet young friend–a state of things but half satisfactory to her so long as the advantage resulting to Mr. Saltram failed to disengage itself from the merely nebulous state. She intimated that her sweet young friend was, if anything, a trifle too reserved; she also intimated that there might now be an opening for another clever young man. There never was the slightest opening, I may here parenthesise, and of course the question can’t come up to-day. These are old frustrations now. Ruth Anvoy hasn’t married, I hear, and neither have I. During the month, toward the end, I wrote to George Gravener to ask if, on a special errand, I might come to see him, and his answer was to knock the very next day at my door. I saw he had immediately connected my enquiry with the talk we had had in the railway- carriage, and his promptitude showed that the ashes of his eagerness weren’t yet cold. I told him there was something I felt I ought in candour to let him know–I recognised the obligation his friendly confidence had laid on me.

“You mean Miss Anvoy has talked to you? She has told me so herself,” he said.

“It wasn’t to tell you so that I wanted to see you,” I replied; “for it seemed to me that such a communication would rest wholly with herself. If however she did speak to you of our conversation she probably told you I was discouraging.”

“Discouraging?”

“On the subject of a present application of The Coxon Fund.”

“To the case of Mr. Saltram? My dear fellow, I don’t know what you call discouraging!” Gravener cried.

“Well I thought I was, and I thought she thought I was.”

“I believe she did, but such a thing’s measured by the effect. She’s not ‘discouraged,'” he said.

“That’s her own affair. The reason I asked you to see me was that it appeared to me I ought to tell you frankly that–decidedly!–I can’t undertake to produce that effect. In fact I don’t want to!”