“Have you usually an end in view?” he asked.

“Have not you?” she answered, turning on him for a moment eyes that Joost had described as “eating up what they looked at.”  “Of course,” she said, looking away again, “it is quite natural, and very possible, that you are here for no purpose, and I am here for no purpose too; you might quite well have come to this little town for amusement, and I have come for the money I might earn as a companion.  Or you might have drifted here by accident, as I might, without any special reason—­” She stopped as she spoke; they were fast approaching the first house of the village now, and she held out her hand for the basket.  “I will take it,” she said; “I have a very short distance to go; thank you so much.”

“Let me carry it the rest of the way,” he insisted; “I am going through the village; we may as well go the rest of the way together, I want you to tell me—­”

But Julia did not tell him anything, except that her way was by the footpath which turned off to the right.  “I could not think of troubling you further,” she said.  “Thank you.”

She put her hand on the basket, so that he was obliged to yield it; then, with another word of thanks, she said “good-evening,” and started by the path.

For a moment he looked after her, annoyed and interested against his will; of course, she meant nothing by her words about his purpose and her own, still it gave him food for reflection about her, and the apparent incongruity of her present surroundings.  On the whole, he was glad he had met her, partly for the entertainment she had given, and partly for the opportunity he had had to apologise.

An apology was due to her for the affair of last winter, he felt it; though, at the same time, he could not hold himself much to blame in the matter.  He had gone to Marbridge to see into his young cousin’s affairs at the request of the boy’s widowed mother.  The affairs, as might have been expected, were in muddle enough, and the boy himself was incorrigibly silly and extravagant.  The whole business needed tact and patience, and in the end had not been very satisfactorily arranged; during the process Captain Polkington’s name had been mentioned more than once; he figured, among other ways, of spending much and getting little in return.  Somehow or other Rawson-Clew had got the impression that the Captain was—­well, perhaps pretty much what he really had come to be; and if that was not quite what his wife had persuaded herself and half Marbridge to think him, surely no one was to blame.  The mistake made was about the Captain’s wife and daughters and position in the town; Rawson-Clew, in the first instance, never gave them a thought; the Captain was a detached person in his mind, and, as such, a possible danger to his cousin’s loose cash.  He went to No. 27 to talk plainly to the man, not to tell him he was a shark and an adventurer; it was the Captain himself who translated and exaggerated thus; not even