She listened to this account of the matter as she might have gazed, from afar, at some queer object that was scarce distinguishable. It left her a moment in the deepest thought, but she presently recovered her tone. "Let me then congratulate you on at last knowing what you want!"
But there were, after all, he instantly showed, no such great reasons for that. "I only know it so far as _you_ know it! I struck while the iron was hot--or at any rate while the hammer was."
"Of course I recognise"--she adopted his image with her restored gaiety--"that it can rarely have been exposed to such a fire. I blazed up, and I know that when I burn----"
She had pulled up with the foolish sense of this. "When you burn?"
He also could laugh out now. "Isn't that usually down to the ground?"
Meeting his laugh, she threw up her light arms. "As high as the sky!" Then she came back, as with a scruple, to the real question. "I suppose you've still formalities to go through."
"With Mr. Prodmore?" Well, he would suppose it too if she liked. "Oh, endless, tiresome ones, no doubt!"
This sketch of them made her wonder. "You mean they'll take so very, very long?"
He seemed after all to know perfectly what he meant. "Every hour, every month, that I can possibly make them last!"
She was with him here, however, but to a certain point. "You mustn't drag them out _too_ much--must you? Won't he think in that case you may want to retract?"
Yule apparently tried to focus Mr. Prodmore under this delusion, and with a success that had a quick, odd result. "I shouldn't be so terribly upset by his mistake, you know, even if he did!"
His manner, with its slight bravado, left her proportionately shocked. "Oh, it would never do to give him any colour whatever for supposing you to have any doubt that, as one may say, you've pledged your honour."
He devoted to this proposition more thought than its simplicity would have seemed to demand; but after a minute, at all events, his intelligence triumphed. "Of course not--not when I _haven't_ any doubt!"
Though his intelligence had triumphed, she still wished to show she was there to support it. "How can you _possibly_ have any--any more than you can possibly have that one's honour is everything in life?" And her charming eyes expressed to him her need to feel that he was quite at one with her on _that_ point.