“Why should you know me?” she interrupted, in a voice of irritation.

“Only because I wish it more than anything else, I have wished it from the day when I first saw your portrait.”

“Oh! that wretched portrait!  I should be sorry if I thought it was at all like me.”

“It is both like and unlike,” said Hilliard.  “What I see of it in your face is the part of you that most pleases me.”

“And that isn’t my real self at all.”

“Perhaps not.  And yet, perhaps, you are mistaken.  That is what I want to learn.  From the portrait, I formed an idea of you.  When I met you, it seemed to me that I was hopelessly astray; yet now I don’t feel sure of it.”

“You would like to know what has changed me from the kind of girl I was at Dudley?”

“Are you changed?”

“In some ways, no doubt.  You, at all events, seem to think so.”

“I can wait.  You will tell me all about it some day.”

“You mustn’t take that for granted.  We have made friends in a sort of way just because we happened to come from the same place, and know the same people.  But——­”

He waited.

“Well, I was going to say that there’s no use in our thinking much about each other.”

“I don’t ask you to think of me.  But I shall think a great deal about you for long enough to come.”

“That’s what I want to prevent.”

“Why?”

“Because, in the end, it might be troublesome to me.”

Hilliard kept silence awhile, then laughed.  When he spoke again, it was of things indifferent natures.

CHAPTER XI

Laziest of men and worst of correspondents, Robert Narramore had as yet sent no reply to the letters in which Hilliard acquainted him with his adventures in London and abroad; but at the end of July he vouchsafed a perfunctory scrawl.  “Too bad not to write before, but I’ve been floored every evening after business in this furious heat.  You may like to hear that my uncle’s property didn’t make a bad show.  I have come in for a round five thousand, and am putting it into brass bedsteads.  Sha’n’t be able to get away until the end of August.  May see you then.”  Hilliard mused enviously on the brass bedstead business.

On looking in at the Camden Town music-shop about this time he found Patty Ringrose flurried and vexed by an event which disturbed her prospects.  Her uncle the shopkeeper, a widower of about fifty, had announced his intention of marrying again, and, worse still, of giving up his business.

“It’s the landlady of the public-house where he goes to play billiards,” said Patty with scornful mirth; “a great fat woman!  Oh!  And he’s going to turn publican.  And my aunt and me will have to look out for ourselves.”

This aunt was the shopkeeper’s maiden sister who had hitherto kept house for him.  “She had been promised an allowance,” said Patty, “but a very mean one.”