“Don’t you know anyone else who would come with you?  Haven’t you made any friends?”

“Not one.  You and Miss Ringrose are the only persons I know in London.”

“I can’t understand why you live in that way.”

“How should I make friends—­among men?  Why, it’s harder than making money—­which I have never done yet, and never shall, I’m afraid.”

Eve averted her eyes, and again seemed to meditate.

“I’ll tell you,” pursued the young man “how the money came to me that I am living on now.  It’ll fill up the few moments while we are waiting.”

He made of it an entertaining narrative, which he concluded just as the soup was laid before them.  Eve listened with frank curiosity, with an amused smile.  Then came a lull in the conversation.  Hilliard began his dinner with appetite and gusto; the girl, after a few sips, neglected her soup and glanced about the neighboring tables.

“In my position,” said Hilliard at length, “what would you have done?”

“It’s a difficult thing to put myself in your position.”

“Is it, really?  Why, then, I will tell you something more of myself.  You say that Mrs. Brewer gave me an excellent character?”

“I certainly shouldn’t have known you from her description.”

Hilliard laughed.

“I seem to you so disreputable?”

“Not exactly that,” replied Eve thoughtfully.  “But you seem altogether a different person from what you seemed to her.”

“Yes, I can understand that.  And it gives me an opportunity for saying that you, Miss Madeley, are as different as possible from the idea I formed of you when I heard Mrs. Brewer’s description.”

“She described me?  I should so like to hear what she said.”

The changing of plates imposed a brief silence.  Hilliard drank a glass of wine and saw that Eve just touched hers with her lips.

“You shall hear that—­but not now.  I want to enable you to judge me, and if I let you know the facts while dinner goes on it won’t be so tiresome as if I began solemnly to tell you my life, as people do in novels.”

He erred, if anything, on the side of brevity, but in the succeeding quarter of an hour Eve was able to gather from his careless talk, which sedulously avoided the pathetic note, a fair notion of what his existence had been from boyhood upward.  It supplemented the account of himself she had received from him when they met for the first time.  As he proceeded she grew more attentive, and occasionally allowed her eyes to encounter his.

“There’s only one other person who has heard all this from me,” he said at length.  “That’s a friend of mine at Birmingham—­a man called Narramore.  When I got Dengate’s money I went to Narramore, and I told him what use I was going to make of it.”

“That’s what you haven’t told me,” remarked the listener.

“I will, now that you can understand me.  I resolved to go right away from all the sights and sounds that I hated, and to live a man’s life, for just as long as the money would last.”