Eliza gave an affected laugh as she repeated the vulgar word, and coloured a little.  “She says if I’ll come to see her in town she’s no doubt but that he’ll ‘propose.’”.

“But I thought you were not going?”

“I don’t care for her,” said Eliza, as if ingratitude were a virtue, “but I rather like the young gentleman.  That makes a difference.  Look here!  She says he’s getting on in business, and would give me a carriage.  How do you think I should look driving in a carriage, like Mrs. Brown?  Should I look as grand as she does?”

“Much grander, I daresay, and much handsomer.”

“They all give dinner parties at Montreal.”  Eliza said this reflectively, speaking the name of that city just as an English country girl would speak of “London.”  “Don’t you think I could go to dinner parties as grand as any one?  And, look here, they showed me all sorts of photographs the Montreal ladies get taken of themselves, and one was taken with her hair down and her side face turned.  And Mrs. Glass has been up here this afternoon, saying that her gentlemen friends say I must be taken in the same way.  She was fixing me for it.  Look, I’ll show you how it is.”

Her great masses of hair, left loose apparently from this last visit, were thrown down her back in a moment, and Eliza, looking-glass in hand, sat herself sideways on a chair, and disposed her hair so that it hung with shining copper glow like a curtain behind her pale profile.  “What do I look like, Miss Sophia?”

“Like what you are, Eliza—­a handsome girl.”

“Then why shouldn’t I marry a rich man?  It would be easier than drudging here, and yet I thought it was grand to be here last year.  It’s easy enough to get up in the world.”

“Yes, when anyone has the right qualities for it.”

“I have the right qualities.”

“Unscrupulousness?” interrogated Sophia; and then she charged the girl with the falsehood of her name.

Eliza put down her looking-glass and rolled up her hair.  There was something almost leonine in her attitude, in her silence, as she fastened the red masses.  Sophia felt the influence of strong feeling upon her; she almost felt fear.  Then Eliza came and stood in front of her.

“Is he very ill, do you think, Miss Sophia?”

“Not dangerously.”  Sophia had no doubt as to who was meant.  “If he would only take reasonable care he’d be pretty well.”

“But he won’t,” she cried.  “On the clearin’, when he used to take cold, he’d do all the wrong things.  He’ll just go and kill himself doing like that now, when he goes back there alone—­and winter coming on.”

“Do you think you could persuade him not to go?”