The album lay beside him, and a feeling of embarrassment, as he saw Mrs. Brewer’s look rest upon it, impelled him to the decisive question.

“That?  Oh! that’s a friend of my daughter Martha’s—­Eve Madeley.  I m sure I don’t wonder at you noticing her.  But it doesn’t do her justice; she’s better looking than that.  It was took better than two years ago—­why, just before you came to me, Mr. Hilliard.  She was going away—­to London.”

“Eve Madeley.”  He repeated the name to himself, and liked it.

“She’s had a deal of trouble, poor thing,” pursued the landlady.  “We was sorry to lose sight of her, but glad, I’m sure, that she went away to do better for herself.  She hasn’t been home since then, and we don’t hear of her coming, and I’m sure nobody can be surprised.  But our Martha heard from her not so long ago—­why, it was about Christmas-time.”

“Is she”—­he was about to add, “in service?” but could not voice the words.  “She has an engagement in London?”

“Yes; she’s a bookkeeper, and earns her pound a week.  She was always clever at figures.  She got on so well at the school that they wanted her to be a teacher, but she didn’t like it.  Then Mr. Reckitt, the ironmonger, a friend of her father’s, got her to help him with his books and bills of an evening, and when she was seventeen, because his business was growing and he hadn’t much of a head for figures himself, he took her regular into the shop.  And glad she was to give up the school-teaching, for she could never abear it.”

“You say she had a lot of trouble?”

“Ah, that indeed she had!  And all her father’s fault.  But for him, foolish man, they might have been a well-to-do family.  But he’s had to suffer for it himself, too.  He lives up here on the hill, in a poor cottage, and takes wages as a timekeeper at Robinson’s when he ought to have been paying men of his own.  The drink—­that’s what it was.  When our Martha first knew them they were living at Walsall, and if it hadn’t a’ been for Eve they’d have had no home at all.  Martha got to know her at the Sunday-school; Eve used to teach a class.  That’s seven or eight years ago; she was only a girl of sixteen, but she had the ways of a grown-up woman, and very lucky it was for them belonging to her.  Often and often they’ve gone for days with nothing but a dry loaf, and the father spending all he got at the public.”

“Was it a large family?” Hilliard inquired.

“Well, let me see; at that time there was Eve’s two sisters and her brother.  Two other children had died, and the mother was dead, too.  I don’t know much about her, but they say she was a very good sort of woman, and it’s likely the eldest girl took after her.  A quieter and modester girl than Eve there never was.  Our Martha lived with her aunt at Walsall—­that’s my only sister, and she was bed-rid, poor thing, and had Martha to look after her.  And when she died, and Martha came back here to us, the Madeley family came here as well, ’cause the father got some kind of work.  But he couldn’t keep it, and he went off I don’t know where, and Eve had the children to keep and look after.  We used to do what we could to help her, but it was a cruel life for a poor thing of her age—­just when she ought to have been enjoying her life, as you may say.”