“Lady Tamworth!” he said after the merest pause and with no more than a natural start of surprise.  Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once.  She had forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different lines that she felt lost and bewildered.  An abashed confusion was the least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it with a nicely-tempered indignation.  Now the positions seemed actually reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she was filled with embarrassment.

A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool’s errand.  “Julian!” she said with something of humility in her voice, and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him.  Julian took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.

This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of exasperation.  She drew her fingers quickly out of his grasp.  “What brought you down to this!” She snapped out the words at him; she had not come to Whitechapel to be slighted at all events.

“I have risen,” he answered quietly.

“Risen?  And you sell baby-linen!”

Julian laughed in pure contentment.  “You don’t understand,” he said.  For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then:  “You have a right to understand.  I will tell you.”  He leaned across the counter, and as he spoke the eager passion of a devotee began to kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice.  “The knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must lift you high?  But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it!  It must lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher!  Well, I have done that.  Yes, that’s why I am here.  And I owe it all to you.”

Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment.  “You owe it all to me?”

“Yes,” he nodded, “all to you.”  And with genuine gratitude he added, “You didn’t know the good that you had done.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she cried.

The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered.  Lady Tamworth bent forward and said hastily, “I must speak to you.”

“Then you must buy something; what shall it be?” Fairholm had already recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves in the wall behind him.

“No, no!” she exclaimed, “not here; I can’t speak to you here.  Come and call on me; what day will you come?”

Julian shook his head.  “Not at all, I am afraid.  I have not the time.”

A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the shutters.  “Ah, it’s Friday,” she said.  “You will be closing soon.”