“That’s very good news,” Eve remarked, gazing across the street.

“You think I ought to accept?”

“I suppose you can pay the fifty guineas, and still leave yourself enough to live upon?”

“Enough till I earn something,” Hilliard answered with a smile.

“Then I should think there’s no doubt.”

“The question is this—­are you perfectly willing to go back to Birmingham?”

“I’m anxious to go.”

“You feel quite restored to health?”

“I was never so well in my life.”

Hilliard looked into her face, and could easily believe that she spoke the truth.  His memory would no longer recall the photograph in Mrs. Brewer’s album; the living Eve, with her progressive changes of countenance, had obliterated that pale image of her bygone self.  He saw her now as a beautiful woman, mysterious to him still in many respects, yet familiar as though they had been friends for years.

“Then, whatever life is before me,” he said.  “I shall have done one thing that is worth doing.”

“Perhaps—­if everyone’s life is worth saving,” Eve answered in a voice just audible.

“Everyone’s is not; but yours was.”

Two men who had been sitting not far from them rose and walked away.  As if more at her ease for this secession, Eve looked at her companion, and said in a tone of intimacy: 

“How I must have puzzled you when you first saw me in London!”

He answered softly: 

“To be sure you did.  And the thought of it puzzles me still.”

“Oh, but can’t you understand?  No; of course you can’t—­I have told you so little.  Just give me an idea of what sort of person you expected to find.”

“Yes, I will.  Judging from your portrait, and from what I was told of you, I looked for a sad, solitary, hard-working girl—­rather poorly dressed—­taking no pleasure—­going much to chapel—­ shrinking from the ordinary world.”

“And you felt disappointed?”

“At first, yes; or, rather, bewildered—­utterly unable to understand you.”

“You are disappointed still?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t have you anything but what you are.”

“Still, that other girl was the one you wished to meet.”

“Yes, before I had seen you.  It was the sort of resemblance between her life and my own.  I thought of sympathy between us.  And the face of the portrait—­but I see better things in the face that is looking at me now.”

“Don’t be quite sure of that—­yes, perhaps.  It’s better to be healthy, and enjoy life, than broken-spirited and hopeless.  The strange thing is that you were right—­you fancied me just the kind of a girl I was:  sad and solitary, and shrinking from people—­true enough.  And I went to chapel, and got comfort from it—­as I hope to do again.  Don’t think that I have no religion.  But I was so unhealthy, and suffered so in every way.  Work and anxiety without cease, from when I was twelve years old.  You know all about my father?  If I hadn’t been clever at figures, what would have become of me?  I should have drudged at some wretched occupation until the work and the misery of everything killed me.”