Hilliard laughed light-heartedly.

“I was to beg you on my knees to forgive her,” pursued Eve.  “But I can’t very well do that in the middle of the street, can I?  Really, she thinks she has behaved disgracefully to you.  She wouldn’t write a letter—­she was ashamed.  ‘Tell him to forget all about me!’ she kept saying.”

“Good little girl!  And what sort of a husband will this fellow Dally make her?”

“No worse than husbands in general, I dare say—­but how well you look!  How you must have been enjoying yourself!”

“I can say exactly the same about you!”

“Oh, but you are sunburnt, and look quite a different man!”

“And you have an exquisite colour in your cheeks, and eyes twice as bright as they used to be; and one would think you had never known a care.”

“I feel almost like that,” said Eve, laughing.

He tried to meet her eyes; she eluded him.

“I have an Alpine hunger; where shall we dine?”

The point called for no long discussion, and presently they were seated in the cool restaurant.  Whilst he nibbled an olive, Hilliard ran over the story of his Swiss tour.

“If only you had been there!  It was the one thing lacking.”

“You wouldn’t have enjoyed yourself half so much.  You amused me by your description of Mr. Narramore, in the letter from Geneva.”

“The laziest rascal born!  But the best-tempered, the easiest to live with.  A thoroughly good fellow; I like him better than ever.  Of course he is improved by coming in for money—­who wouldn’t be, that has any good in him at all?  But it amazes me that he can be content to go back to Birmingham and his brass bedsteads.  Sheer lack of energy, I suppose.  He’ll grow dreadfully fat, I fear, and by when he becomes really a rich man—­it’s awful to think of.”

Eve asked many questions about Narramore; his image gave mirthful occupation to her fancy.  The dinner went merrily on, and when the black coffee was set before them: 

“Why not have it outside?” said Eve.  “You would like to smoke, I know.”

Hilliard assented, and they seated themselves under the awning.  The boulevard glowed in a golden light of sunset; the sound of its traffic was subdued to a lulling rhythm.

“There’s a month yet before the leaves will begin to fall,” murmured the young man, when he had smoked awhile in silence.

“Yes,” was the answer.  “I shall be glad to have a little summer still in Birmingham.”

“Do you wish to go?”

“I shall go to-morrow, or the day after,” Eve replied quietly.

Then again there came silence.

“Something has been proposed to me,” said Hilliard, at length, leaning forward with his elbows upon the table.  “I mentioned that our friend Birching is an architect.  He’s in partnership with his brother, a much older man.  Well, they nave offered to take me into their office if I pay a premium of fifty guineas.  As soon as I can qualify myself to be of use to them, they’ll give me a salary.  And I shall have the chance of eventually doing much better than I ever could at the old grind, where, in fact, I had no prospect whatever.”