of any strangeness in the position in which she now found herself—­the unawareness of an angel....  When Killigrew talked to her she answered frankly and freely, almost with the confidence of a child.  She could not be more than twenty, Ishmael decided, and with all her maturity of build had a childish air.  The fashions of the day were not conducive to youthfulness of appearance; but not even the long full skirts trimmed with bands of black velvet or the close-fitting bodice could make her seem other than a schoolgirl, while the hair worn brushed loosely back from the forehead instead of brought down in sleek waves gave her a look that reminded him of someone, though he could not remember whom.  Then with a sudden flash he remembered it was Hilaria, little Hilaria Eliot—­she too had that look which, being in the middle of the period himself, he did not recognise as alien to its stamp, but which was so conspicuously so that women might have called it dowdy and men individual.  But this girl was feminine, that was obvious in the timid shyness even of her trusting attitude.

Oddly enough—­or oddly as if seemed to Ishmael, who was wont to be in the background when out with Killigrew—­it was to him that she chiefly addressed herself.  Killigrew sat watching as from general remarks of great propriety about the weather and Ishmael’s opinions of London as a place to visit they passed to her views on it as a place in which to live.  These were, apparently, not over favourable.

“One always feels a stranger, in a way, if one was born and brought up in the country, doesn’t one?  I feel that every day.  I’ve never got over expecting to see the big elm outside my window when I wake, and instead I see the chimney-pots.  And then I may just be getting used to it when there arrives a letter from Papa telling me how it all looks at home—­all the silly little things about the flowers and the chickens and the old people in the parish, and then I have to start all over again.”

There was a strain of wistfulness in her full voice, but her eyes were limpidly unconscious of it, with their candid glance that suggested courage and even a certain gaiety.  If it had not been for that look in her eyes she would have seemed doll-like; even as it was in the purely physical aspect of her there was a waxen dollishness which was at once disconcerting and attractive.  It was obvious that Carminow, who presumably knew her, was passionately convinced that she was what he would have called “all right”; that he was considerably more fond of her than he would have admitted was equally obvious.  To him that odd dollishness of aspect was just the sweet pink and white of a naive young girl, but to Killigrew it gave, by its very completeness, a hint as of something oddly inhuman, or at least unawakened, as though she had been a puppet, a pretty puppet that walked and spoke and said the right things.  It was not so much any lack of intelligence in what she