“Very, when I remember the words with which you last parted from me.  If I was hateful to you then, how am I less so now?”

“A man in anger, and especially one of my nature, often says more than he means.  It was never you that were hateful to me, though your beliefs and your circumstances might madden me into saying such a thing.”

“My beliefs, as I told you then, are a part of myself—­are myself.”

She said it with irritable insistence—­an accent which would doubtless have been significant in the ears of Eleanor Spence.

“I don’t wish to speak of that.  Have you recovered your health, Miriam?”

“I am better.”

He came nearer again, throwing his hat aside.

“Will you let me sit down?  I’ve had a long journey in third-class, and I feel tired.  Such weather as this doesn’t help to make me cheerful.  I imagined Naples with a rather different sky.”

Miriam motioned towards a chair, and looked drearily from the window at the dreary sea.  Neither spoke again for two or three minutes.  Reuben Elgar surveyed the room, but inattentively.

“What is it you want of me?” Miriam asked, facing him abruptly.

“Want?  You hint that I have come to ask you for money?”

“I shouldn’t have thought it impossible.  If you were in need—­you spoke of a third-class journey—­I am, at all events, the natural person for your thoughts to turn to.”

Reuben laughed dispiritedly.

“No, no, Miriam; I haven’t quite got to that.  You are the very last person I should think of in such a case.”

“Why?”

“Simply because I am not quite so contemptible as you think me.  I don’t quarrel with my sister, and come back after some years to make it up just because I want to make a demand on her purse.”

“You haven’t accustomed me to credit you with high motives, Reuben.”

“No.  And I have never succeeded in making you understand me.  I suppose it’s hopeless that you ever will.  We are too different.  You regard me as a vulgar reprobate, who by some odd freak of nature happens to be akin to you.  I can picture so well what your imagination makes of me.  All the instances of debauchery and general blackguardism that the commerce of life has forced upon your knowledge go towards completing the ideal.  It’s a pity.  I have always felt that you and I might have been a great deal to each other if you had had a reasonable education.  I remember you as a child rebelling against the idiocies of your training, before your brain and soul had utterly yielded; then you were my sister, and even then, if it had been possible, I would have dragged you away and saved you.”

“I thank Heaven,” said Miriam, “that my childhood was in other hands than yours!”

“Yes; and it is very bitter to me to hear you say so.”

Miriam kept silence, but looked at him less disdain fully.