“Thank you,” she said; “good day.”

With the jabbed nerve aching badly she came slowly homewards.

Before the garden gate the little model herself was gazing at the house, as if she had been there some time.  Approaching from across the road, Bianca had an admirable view of that young figure, now very trim and neat, yet with something in its lines—­more supple, perhaps, but less refined—­which proclaimed her not a lady; a something fundamentally undisciplined or disciplined by the material facts of life alone, rather than by a secret creed of voluntary rules.  It showed here and there in ways women alone could understand; above all, in the way her eyes looked out on that house which she was clearly longing to enter.  Not ’Shall I go in?’ was in that look, but ‘Dare I go in?’

Suddenly she saw Bianca.  The meeting of these two was very like the ordinary meeting of a mistress and her maid.  Bianca’s face had no expression, except the faint, distant curiosity which seems to say:  ’You are a sealed book to me; I have always found you so.  What you really think and do I shall never know.’

The little model’s face wore a half-caught-out, half-stolid look.

“Please go in,” Bianca said; “my father will be glad to see you.”

She held the garden gate open for the girl to pass through.  Her feeling at that moment was one of slight amusement at the futility of her journey.  Not even this small piece of generosity was permitted her, it seemed.

“How are you getting on?”

The little model made an impulsive movement at such an unexpected question.  Checking it at once, she answered: 

“Very well, thank you; that is, not very—–­”

“You will find my father tired to-day; he has caught a chill.  Don’t let him read too much, please.”

The little model seemed to try and nerve herself to make some statement, but, failing, passed into the house.

Bianca did not follow, but stole back into the garden, where the sun was still falling on a bed of wallflowers at the far end.  She bent down over these flowers till her veil touched them.  Two wild bees were busy there, buzzing with smoky wings, clutching with their black, tiny legs at the orange petals, plunging their black, tiny tongues far down into the honeyed centres.  The flowers quivered beneath the weight of their small dark bodies.  Bianca’s face quivered too, bending close to them, nor making the slightest difference to their hunt.

Hilary, who, it has been seen, lived in thoughts about events rather than in events themselves, and to whom crude acts and words had little meaning save in relation to what philosophy could make of them, greeted with a startled movement the girl’s appearance in the corridor outside Mr. Stone’s apartment.  But the little model, who mentally lived very much from hand to mouth, and had only the philosophy of wants, acted differently.  She knew that for