“I daresay,” muttered the other.  “Yes, it is a queer thing.  I have been saved, I suppose, by the necessity of supporting my relatives.  I’ve seen so much of women suffering from poverty that it has got me into the habit of thinking of them as nothing but burdens to a man.”

“As they nearly always are.”

“Yes, nearly always.”

Narramore pondered with his amiable smile; the other, after a moment’s gloom, shook himself free again, and talked with growing exhilaration of the new life that had dawned before him.

CHAPTER IV

Hilliard’s lodgings—­they were represented by a single room—­ commanded a prospect which, to him a weariness and a disgust, would have seemed impressive enough to eyes beholding it for the first time.  On the afternoon of his last day at Dudley he stood by the window and looked forth, congratulating himself, with a fierceness of emotion which defied misgiving, that he would gaze no more on this scene of his servitude.

The house was one of a row situated on a terrace, above a muddy declivity marked with footpaths.  It looked over a wide expanse of waste ground, covered in places with coarse herbage, but for the most part undulating in bare tracts of slag and cinder.  Opposite, some quarter of a mile away, rose a lofty dome-shaped hill, tree-clad from base to summit, and rearing above the bare branches of its topmost trees the ruined keep of Dudley Castle.  Along the foot of this hill ran the highway which descends from Dudley town—­ hidden by rising ground on the left—­to the low-lying railway-station; there, beyond, the eye traversed a great plain, its limit the blending of earth and sky in lurid cloud.  A ray of yellow sunset touched the height and its crowning ruin; at the zenith shone a space of pure pale blue save for these points of relief the picture was colourless and uniformly sombre.  Far and near, innumerable chimneys sent forth fumes of various density broad-flung jets of steam, coldly white against the murky distance; wan smoke from lime-kilns, wafted in long trails; reek of solid blackness from pits and forges, voluming aloft and far-floated by the sluggish wind.

Born at Birmingham, the son of a teacher of drawing, Maurice Hilliard had spent most of his life in the Midland capital; to its grammar school he owed an education just sufficiently prolonged to unfit him for the tasks of an underling, yet not thorough enough to qualify him for professional life.  In boyhood he aspired to the career of an artist, but his father, himself the wreck of a would-be painter, rudely discouraged this ambition; by way of compromise between the money-earning craft and the beggarly art, he became a mechanical-draughtsman.  Of late years he had developed a strong taste for the study of architecture; much of his leisure was given to this subject, and what money he could spare went in the purchase of books and prints which helped him to extend his architectural knowledge.  In moods of hope, he had asked himself whether it might not be possible to escape from bondage to the gods of iron, and earn a living in an architect’s office.  That desire was now forgotten in his passionate resolve to enjoy liberty without regard for the future.