“Very few.  I should doubt whether there’s anyone he talks with as he does with me.  He’ll never get much good out of his money; but if he fell into real poverty—­poverty like mine—­it would kill him.  I know he looks at me as an astonishing creature, and marvels that I don’t buy a good dose of chloral and have done with it.”

Eve did not join in his laugh.

“I can’t bear to hear you speak of your poverty,” she said in an undertone.  “You remind me that I am the cause of it.”

“Good Heavens!  As if I should mention it if I were capable of such a thought!”

“But it’s the fact,” she persisted, with something like irritation.  “But for me, you would have gone into the architect’s office with enough to live upon comfortably for a time.”

“That’s altogether unlikely,” Hilliard declared.  “But for you, it’s improbable that I should have gone to Birching’s at all.  At this moment I should be spending my money in idleness, and, in the end, should have gone back to what I did before.  You have given me a start in a new life.”

This, and much more of the same tenor, failed to bring a light upon Eve’s countenance.  At length she asked suddenly, with a defiant bluntness——­

“Have you ever thought what sort of a wife I am likely to make?”

Hilliard tried to laugh, but was disagreeably impressed by her words and the look that accompanied them.

“I have thought about it, to be sure,” he answered carelessly

“And don’t you feel a need of courage?”

“Of course.  And not only the need but the courage itself.”

“Tell me the real, honest truth.”  She bent forward, and gazed at him with eyes one might have thought hostile.  “I demand the truth of you:  I have a right to know it.  Don’t you often wish you had never seen me?”

“You ’re in a strange mood.”

“Don’t put me off.  Answer!”

“To ask such a question,” he replied quietly, “is to charge me with a great deal of hypocrisy.  I did once all but wish I had never seen you.  If I lost you now I should lose what seems to me the strongest desire of my life.  Do you suppose I sit down and meditate on your capacity as cook or housemaid?  It would be very prudent and laudable, but I have other thoughts—­that give me trouble enough.”

“What thoughts?”

“Such as one doesn’t talk about—­if you insist on frankness.”

Her eyes wandered.

“It’s only right to tell you,” she said, after silence, “that I dread poverty as much as ever I did.  And I think poverty in marriage a thousand times worse than when one is alone.”

“Well, we agree in that.  But why do you insist upon it just now?  Are you beginning to be sorry that we ever met?”

“Not a day passes but I feel sorry for it.”

“I suppose you are harping on the old scruple.  Why will you plague me about it?”

“I mean,” said Eve, with eyes down, “that you are the worse off for having met me, but I mean something else as well.  Do you think it possible that anyone can owe too much gratitude, even to a person one likes?”