Come in for half-an-hour?'

'Not to-night, thanks!'

They parted, and Neigh went in. When he got upstairs he murmured in his
deepest chest note, 'O, lords, that I should come to this! But I shall
never be such a fool as to marry her! What a flat that poor young devil
was not to discover that we were tarred with the same brush. O, the
deuce, the deuce!' he continued, walking about the room as if
passionately stamping, but not quite doing it because another man had
rooms below.

Neigh drew from his pocket-book an envelope embossed with the name of a
fashionable photographer, and out of this pulled a portrait of the lady
who had, in fact, enslaved his secret self equally with his frank young
friend the painter. After contemplating it awhile with a face of cynical
adoration, he murmured, shaking his head, 'Ah, my lady; if you only knew
this, I should be snapped up like a snail! Not a minute's peace for me
till I had married you. I wonder if I shall!--I wonder.'

Neigh was a man of five-and-thirty--Ladywell's senior by ten years; and,
being of a phlegmatic temperament, he had glided thus far through the
period of eligibility with impunity. He knew as well as any man how far
he could go with a woman and yet keep clear of having to meet her in
church without her bonnet; but it is doubtful if his mind that night were
less disturbed with the question how to guide himself out of the natural
course which his passion for Ethelberta might tempt him into, than was
Ladywell's by his ardent wish to secure her.

* * * * *

About the time at which Neigh and Ladywell parted company, Christopher
Julian was entering his little place in Bloomsbury. The quaint figure of
Faith, in her bonnet and cloak, was kneeling on the hearth-rug
endeavouring to stir a dull fire into a bright one.

'What--Faith! you have never been out alone?' he said.

Faith's soft, quick-shutting eyes looked unutterable things, and she
replied, 'I have been to hear Mrs. Petherwin's story-telling again.'

'And walked all the way home through the streets at this time of night, I
suppose!'

'Well, nobody molested me, either going or coming back.'

'Faith, I gave you strict orders not to go into the streets after two
o'clock in the day, and now here you are taking no notice of what I say
at all!'

'The truth is, Kit, I wanted to see with my spectacles what this woman
was really like, and I went without them last time. I slipped in behind,
and nobody