Putting himself into the little model’s place gave him but small delight.  Making due allowance for the sentiment men naturally import into their appreciation of the lives of women, his conception of her place was doubtless not so very wrong.

Here was a child, barely twenty years of age, country bred, neither a lady nor quite a working-girl, without a home or relatives, according to her own account—­at all events, without those who were disposed to help her—­without apparently any sort of friend; helpless by nature, and whose profession required a more than common wariness—­this girl he was proposing to set quite adrift again by cutting through the single slender rope which tethered her.  It was like digging up a little rose-tree planted with one’s own hands in some poor shelter, just when it had taken root, and setting it where the full winds would beat against it.  To do so brusque and, as it seemed to Hilary, so inhumane a thing was foreign to his nature.  There was also the little matter of that touch of fever—­the distant music he had been hearing since the waggons came in to Covent Garden.

With a feeling that was almost misery, therefore, he waited for her on Monday afternoon, walking to and fro in his study, where all the walls were white, and all the woodwork coloured like the leaf of a cigar; where the books were that colour too, in Hilary’s special deerskin binding; where there were no flowers nor any sunlight coming through the windows, but plenty of sheets of paper—­a room which youth seemed to have left for ever, the room of middle age!

He called her in with the intention of at once saying what he had to say, and getting it over in the fewest words.  But he had not reckoned fully either with his own nature or with woman’s instinct.  Nor had he allowed—­being, for all his learning, perhaps because of it, singularly unable to gauge the effects of simple actions—­for the proprietary relations he had established in the girl’s mind by giving her those clothes.

As a dog whose master has it in his mind to go away from him, stands gazing up with tragic inquiry in his eyes, scenting to his soul that coming cruelty—­as a dog thus soon to be bereaved, so stood the little model.

By the pose of every limb, and a fixed gaze bright as if tears were behind it, and by a sort of trembling, she seemed to say:  ’I know why you have sent for me.’

When Hilary saw her stand like that he felt as a man might when told to flog his fellow-creature.  To gain time he asked her what she did with herself all day.  The little model evidently tried to tell herself that her foreboding had been needless.