ble work waiting for
her hand, and duty kept her chained to the social oar!

On the afternoon, then, of the following Friday she dressed with
what even for her was unusual care, aiming at a complex effect of
daintiness and severity, and drove down in a hansom to Whitechapel.
She stopped the cab some yards from the shop and walked up to the
window. Through the glass she could see Julian standing behind the
counter. His hands (she noticed them particularly because he was
displaying some cheap skeins of coloured wool) seemed perhaps a trifle
thinner and more nervous, his features a little sharpened, and there
was a sprinkling of grey in the black of his hair. For the first time
since the conception of her scheme Lady Tamworth experienced a feeling
of irresolution. With Fairholm in the flesh before her eyes, the task
appeared difficult; its reality pressed in upon her, driving a breach
through the flimsy wall of her fancies. She resolved to wait until the
shop should be empty, and to that end took a few steps slowly up the
street and returned yet more slowly. She looked into the window again;
Julian was alone now, and still she hesitated. The admiring comments
of two loungers on the kerb concerning her appearance at last
determined her, and she brusquely thrust open the door. A little bell
jangled shrilly above it and Julian looked up.

"Lady Tamworth!" he said after the merest pause and with no more than
a natural start of surprise. Lady Tamworth, however, was too taken
aback by the cool manner of his greeting to respond at once. She had
forecast the commencement of the interview upon such wholly different
lines that she felt lost and bewildered. An abashed confusion was the
least that she expected from him, and she was prepared to increase it
with a nicely-tempered indignation. Now the positions seemed actually
reversed; he was looking at her with a composed attention, while she
was filled with embarrassment.

A suspicion flashed through her mind that she had come upon a fool's
errand. "Julian!" she said with something of humility in her voice,
and she timidly reached out her little gloved hand towards him. Julian
took it into the palm of his own and gazed at it with a sort of
wondering tenderness, as though he had lighted upon a toy which he
remembered to have prized dearly in an almost forgotten childhood.

This second blow to her pride quickened in her a feeling of
exasperation. She drew her fingers quickly out of