“Even when you are,” he persisted, “we shall only be able to see each other in places like this.  I can’t talk—­can’t say half the things I wish to——­”

“We’ll think about it.  Ah, it’s warm in here!”

This afternoon the guardians of the Hall were likely to be troubled with few visitors.  Eve at once led the way upstairs to a certain suite of rooms, hung with uninteresting pictures, where she and Hilliard had before this spent an hour safe from disturbance.  She placed herself in the recess of a window:  her companion took a few steps backward and forward.

“Let me do what I wish,” he urged.  “There’s a whole long winter before us.  I am sure I could find a couple of rooms at a very low rent, and some old woman would come in to do all that’s necessary.”

“If you like.”

“I may?  You would come there?” he asked eagerly.

“Of course I would come.  But I sha’n’t like to see you in a bare, comfortless place.”

“It needn’t be that.  A few pounds will make a decent sort of sitting-room.”

“Anything to tell me?” Eve asked, abruptly quitting the subject.

She seemed to be in better spirits than of late, notwithstanding the evil sky; and Hilliard smiled with pleasure as he regarded her.

“Nothing unusual.  Oh, yes; I’m forgetting.  I had a letter from Emily, and went to see her.”

Hilliard had scarcely seen his quondam sister-in-law since she became Mrs. Marr.  On the one occasion of his paying a call, after his return from Paris, it struck him that her husband offered no very genial welcome.  He had expected this, and willingly kept aloof.

“Read the letter.”

Eve did so.  It began, “My dear Maurice,” and ended, “Ever affectionately and gratefully yours.”  The rest of its contents ran thus: 

“I am in great trouble—­dreadfully unhappy.  It would be such a kindness if you would let me see you.  I can’t put in a letter what I want to say, and I do hope you won’t refuse to come.  Friday afternoon, at three, would do, if you can get away from business for once.  How I look back on the days when you used to come over from Dudley and have tea with us in the dear little room.  Do come!”

“Of course,” said Hilliard, laughing as he met Eve’s surprised look.  “I knew what that meant.  I would much rather have got out of it, but it would have seemed brutal.  So I went.  The poor simpleton has begun to find that marriage with one man isn’t necessarily the same thing as marriage with another.  In Ezra Marr she has caught a Tartar.”

“Surely he doesn’t ill-use her?”

“Not a bit of it.  He is simply a man with a will, and finds it necessary to teach his wife her duties.  Emily knows no more about the duties of life than her little five-year-old girl.  She thought she could play with a second husband as she did with the first, and she was gravely mistaken.  She complained to me of a thousand acts of tyranny—­every one of them, I could see, merely a piece of rude commonsense.  The man must be calling himself an idiot for marrying her.  I could only listen with a long face.  Argument with Emily is out of the question.  And I shall take good care not to go there again.”