ead of brought down in sleek waves gave her a look that reminded him
of someone, though he could not remember whom. Then with a sudden flash
he remembered it was Hilaria, little Hilaria Eliot--she too had that
look which, being in the middle of the period himself, he did not
recognise as alien to its stamp, but which was so conspicuously so that
women might have called it dowdy and men individual. But this girl was
feminine, that was obvious in the timid shyness even of her trusting
attitude.

Oddly enough--or oddly as if seemed to Ishmael, who was wont to be in
the background when out with Killigrew--it was to him that she chiefly
addressed herself. Killigrew sat watching as from general remarks of
great propriety about the weather and Ishmael's opinions of London as a
place to visit they passed to her views on it as a place in which to
live. These were, apparently, not over favourable.

"One always feels a stranger, in a way, if one was born and brought up
in the country, doesn't one? I feel that every day. I've never got over
expecting to see the big elm outside my window when I wake, and instead
I see the chimney-pots. And then I may just be getting used to it when
there arrives a letter from Papa telling me how it all looks at
home--all the silly little things about the flowers and the chickens and
the old people in the parish, and then I have to start all over again."

There was a strain of wistfulness in her full voice, but her eyes were
limpidly unconscious of it, with their candid glance that suggested
courage and even a certain gaiety. If it had not been for that look in
her eyes she would have seemed doll-like; even as it was in the purely
physical aspect of her there was a waxen dollishness which was at once
disconcerting and attractive. It was obvious that Carminow, who
presumably knew her, was passionately convinced that she was what he
would have called "all right"; that he was considerably more fond of her
than he would have admitted was equally obvious. To him that odd
dollishness of aspect was just the sweet pink and white of a naive young
girl, but to Killigrew it gave, by its very completeness, a hint as of
something oddly inhuman, or at least unawakened, as though she had been
a puppet, a pretty puppet that walked and spoke and said the right
things. It was not so much any lack of intelligence in what she said as
in her slow speech and her whole look. Her skin was so white--and
Killigrew thought h