acquainted with ideas than facts, with the trimming of words than with
the shaping of events. He turned a queer, perplexed, almost quizzical
eye on it. Stephen had irritated him profoundly. He had such a way of
pettifying things! Yet, in truth, the affair would seem ridiculous
enough to an ordinary observer. What would a man of sound common sense,
like Mr. Purcey, think of it? Why not, as Stephen had suggested, drop
it? Here, however, Hilary approached the marshy ground of feeling.

To give up befriending a helpless girl the moment he found himself
personally menaced was exceedingly distasteful. But would she be
friendless? Were there not, in Stephen's words, a hundred things he did
not know about her? Had she not other resources? Had she not a story?
But here, too, he was hampered by his delicacy: one did not pry into the
private lives of others!

The matter, too, was hopelessly complicated by the domestic troubles of
the Hughs family. No conscientious man--and whatever Hilary lacked, no
one ever accused him of a lack of conscience--could put aside that aspect
of the case.

Wandering among these reflections were his thoughts about Bianca. She was
his wife. However he might feel towards her now, whatever their
relations, he must not put her in a false position. Far from wishing to
hurt her, he desired to preserve her, and everyone, from trouble and
annoyance. He had told Stephen that his interest in the girl was purely
protective. But since the night when, leaning out into the moonlight, he
heard the waggons coming in to Covent Garden Market, a strange feeling
had possessed him--the sensation of a man who lies, with a touch of fever
on him, listening to the thrum of distant music--sensuous, not
unpleasurable.

Those who saw him sitting there so quietly, with his face resting on his
hand, imagined, no doubt, that he was wrestling with some deep, abstract
proposition, some great thought to be given to mankind; for there was
that about Hilary which forced everyone to connect him instantly with the
humaner arts.

The sun began to leave the long pale waters.

A nursemaid and two children came and sat down beside him. Then it was
that, underneath his seat, Miranda found what she had been looking for
all her life. It had no smell, made no movement, was pale-grey in
colour, like herself. It had no hair that she could find; its tail was
like her own; it took no liberties, was silent, had no passions,