n common wariness--this girl he was
proposing to set quite adrift again by cutting through the single slender
rope which tethered her. It was like digging up a little rose-tree
planted with one's own hands in some poor shelter, just when it had taken
root, and setting it where the full winds would beat against it. To do
so brusque and, as it seemed to Hilary, so inhumane a thing was foreign
to his nature. There was also the little matter of that touch of
fever--the distant music he had been hearing since the waggons came in to
Covent Garden.

With a feeling that was almost misery, therefore, he waited for her on
Monday afternoon, walking to and fro in his study, where all the walls
were white, and all the woodwork coloured like the leaf of a cigar; where
the books were that colour too, in Hilary's special deerskin binding;
where there were no flowers nor any sunlight coming through the windows,
but plenty of sheets of paper--a room which youth seemed to have left for
ever, the room of middle age!

He called her in with the intention of at once saying what he had to say,
and getting it over in the fewest words. But he had not reckoned fully
either with his own nature or with woman's instinct. Nor had he
allowed--being, for all his learning, perhaps because of it, singularly
unable to gauge the effects of simple actions--for the proprietary
relations he had established in the girl's mind by giving her those
clothes.

As a dog whose master has it in his mind to go away from him, stands
gazing up with tragic inquiry in his eyes, scenting to his soul that
coming cruelty--as a dog thus soon to be bereaved, so stood the little
model.

By the pose of every limb, and a fixed gaze bright as if tears were
behind it, and by a sort of trembling, she seemed to say: 'I know why you
have sent for me.'

When Hilary saw her stand like that he felt as a man might when told to
flog his fellow-creature. To gain time he asked her what she did with
herself all day. The little model evidently tried to tell herself that
her foreboding had been needless.

Now that the mornings were nice--she said with some animation--she got up
much earlier, and did her needlework first thing; she then "did out" the
room. There were mouse-holes in her room, and she had bought a trap.
She had caught a mouse last night. She hadn't liked to kill it; she had
put it in a tin box, and let it go when she went out. Quick to see that
Hilary was intereste