Now that the days of sun and warmth were past, it was difficult to arrange for a meeting under circumstances that allowed of free comfortable colloquy.  Eve declared that her father’s house offered no sort of convenience; it was only a poor cottage, and Hilliard would be altogether out of place there.  To his lodgings she could not come.  Of necessity they had recourse to public places in Birmingham, where an hour or two of talk under shelter might make Eve’s journey hither worth while.  As Hilliard lived at the north end of the town, he suggested Aston Hall as a possible rendezvous, and here they met, early one Saturday afternoon in December.

From the eminence which late years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife.  Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, shakes as the steam-tram rushes by.  Hilliard’s imagination was both attracted and repelled by this relic of what he deemed a better age.  He enjoyed the antique chambers, the winding staircases, the lordly gallery, with its dark old portraits and vast fireplaces, the dim-lighted nooks where one could hide alone and dream away the present; but in the end, reality threw scorn upon such pleasure.  Aston Hall was a mere architectural relic, incongruous and meaning. less amid its surroundings; the pathos of its desecrated dignity made him wish that it might be destroyed, and its place fittingly occupied by some People’s Palace, brand new, aglare with electric light, ringing to the latest melodies of the street.  When he had long gazed at its gloomy front, the old champion of royalism seemed to shrink together, humiliated by Time’s insults.

It was raining when he met Eve at the entrance.

“This won’t do,” were his first words.  “You can’t come over in such weather as this.  If it hadn’t seemed to be clearing tip an hour or two ago, I should have telegraphed to stop you.”

“Oh, the weather is nothing to me,” Eve answered, with resolute gaiety.  “I’m only too glad of the change.  Besides, it won’t go on much longer.  I shall get a place.”

Hilliard never questioned her about her attempts to obtain an engagement; the subject was too disagreeable to him.

“Nothing yet,” she continued, as they walked up the muddy roadway to the Hall.  “But I know you don’t like to talk about it.”

“I have something to propose.  How if I take a couple of cheap rooms in some building let out for offices, and put in a few sticks of furniture?  Would you come to see me there?”

He watched her face as she listened to the suggestion, and his timidity seemed justified by her expression.

“You would be so uncomfortable in such a place.  Don’t trouble.  We shall manage to meet somehow.  I am certain to be living here before long.”