“Have you always lived at Dudley?” she asked.

He sketched rapidly the course of his life, without reference to domestic circumstances.  Before he had ceased speaking he saw that Eve’s look was directed towards something at a distance behind him; she smiled, and at length nodded, in recognition of some person who approached.  Then a voice caused him to look round.

“Oh, there you are!  I have been hunting for you ever so long.”

As soon as Hilliard saw the speaker, he had no difficulty in remembering her.  It was Eve’s companion of the day before yesterday, with whom she had started for the theatre.  The girl evidently felt some surprise at discovering her friend in conversation with a man she did not know; but Eve was equal to the situation, and spoke calmly.

“This gentleman is from my part of the world—­from Dudley.  Mr. Hilliard—­Miss Ringrose.”

Hilliard stood up.  Miss Ringrose, after attempting a bow of formal dignity, jerked out her hand, gave a shy little laugh, and said with amusing abruptness—­

“Do you really come from Dudley?”

“I do really, Miss Ringrose.  Why does it sound strange to you?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that it sounds strange.”  She spoke in a high but not unmusical note, very quickly, and with timid glances to either side of her collocutor.  “But Eve—­Miss Madeley—­gave me the idea that Dudley people must be great, rough, sooty men.  Don’t laugh at me, please.  You know very well, Eve, that you always talk in that way.  Of course, I knew that there must be people of a different kind, but—­there now, you’re making me confused, and I don’t know what I meant to say.”

She was a thin-faced, but rather pretty girl, with auburn hair.  Belonging to a class which, especially in its women, has little intelligence to boast of, she yet redeemed herself from the charge of commonness by a certain vivacity of feature and an agreeable suggestion of good feeling in her would-be frank but nervous manner.  Hilliard laughed merrily at the vision in her mind of “great, rough, sooty men.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Miss Ringrose.”

“No, but really—­what sort of a place is Dudley?  Is it true that they call it the Black Country?”

“Let us walk about,” interposed Eve.  “Mr. Hilliard will tell you all he can about the Black Country.”

She moved on, and they rambled aimlessly; among cigar-smoking clerks and shopmen, each with the female of his kind in wondrous hat and drapery; among domestic groups from the middle-class suburbs, and from regions of the artisan; among the frankly rowdy and the solemnly superior; here and there a man in evening dress, generally conscious of his white tie and starched shirt, and a sprinkling of unattached young women with roving eyes.  Hilliard, excited by the success of his advances, and by companionship after long solitude, became very unlike himself, talking and jesting freely.  Most of the conversation passed between him and Miss Ringrose; Eve had fallen into an absent mood, answered carelessly when addressed, laughed without genuine amusement, and sometimes wore the look of trouble which Hilliard had observed whilst in the train.