“What do you mean by a man’s life?”

“Why, a life of enjoyment, instead of a life not worthy to be called life at all.  This is part of it, this evening.  I have had enjoyable hours since I left Dudley, but never yet one like this.  And because I owe it to you, I shall remember you with gratitude as long as I remember any. thing at all.”

“That’s a mistake,” said Eve.  “You owe the enjoyment, whatever it is, to your money, not to me.”

“You prefer to look at it in that way.  Be it so.  I had a delightful month in Paris, but I was driven back to England by loneliness.  Now, if you had been there!  If I could have seen you each evening for an hour or two, had dinner with you at the restaurant, talked with you about what I had seen in the day—­but that would have been perfection, and I have never hoped for more than moderate, average pleasure—­such as ordinary well-to-do men take as their right.”

“What did you do in Paris?”

“Saw things I have longed to see any time the last fifteen years or so.  Learned to talk a little French.  Got to feel a better educated man than I was before.”

“Didn’t Dudley seem a long way off when you were there?” asked Eve half absently.

“In another planet.—­You thought once of going to Paris; Miss Ringrose told me.”

Eve knitted her brows, and made no answer.

CHAPTER X

When fruit had been set before them—­and as he was peeling a banana: 

“What a vast difference,” said Hilliard, “between the life of people who dine, and of those who don’t!  It isn’t the mere pleasure of eating, the quality of the food—­though that must have a great influence on mind and character.  But to sit for an hour or two each evening in quiet, orderly enjoyment, with graceful things about one, talking of whatever is pleasant—­how it civilises!  Until three months ago I never dined in my life, and I know well what a change it has made in me.”

“I never dined till this evening,” said Eve.

“Never?  This is the first time you have been at a restaurant?”

“For dinner—­yes.”

Hilliard heard the avowal with surprise and delight.  After all, there could not have been much intimacy between her and the man she met at the Exhibition.

“When I go back to slavery,” he continued, “I shall bear it more philosophically.  It was making me a brute, but I think there’ll be no more danger of that.  The memory of civilisation will abide with me.  I shall remind myself that I was once a free man, and that will support me.”

Eve regarded him with curiosity.

“Is there no choice?” she asked.  “While you have money, couldn’t you find some better way of earning a living?”

“I have given it a thought now and then, but it’s very doubtful.  There’s only one thing at which I might have done well, and that’s architecture.  From studying it just for my own pleasure, I believe I know more about architecture than most men who are not in the profession; but it would take a long time before I could earn money by it.  I could prepare myself to be an architectural draughtsman, no doubt, and might do as well that way as drawing machinery.  But——­”