imple
sum, to the man of delicate and speculative temper seems to have no
answer.

So it was with Hilary in that special web wherein his spirit struggled,
sunrise unto sunset, and by moonlight afterward. Inclination, and the
circumstances of a life which had never forced him to grips with either
men or women, had detached him from the necessity for giving or taking
orders. He had almost lost the faculty. Life had been a picture with
blurred outlines melting into a softly shaded whole. Not for years had
anything seemed to him quite a case for "Yes" or "No." It had been
his creed, his delight, his business, too, to try and put himself in
everybody's place, so that now there were but few places where he did
not, speculatively speaking, feel at home.

Putting himself into the little model's place gave him but small
delight. Making due allowance for the sentiment men naturally import
into their appreciation of the lives of women, his conception of her
place was doubtless not so very wrong.

Here was a child, barely twenty years of age, country bred, neither a
lady nor quite a working-girl, without a home or relatives, according to
her own account--at all events, without those who were disposed to help
her--without apparently any sort of friend; helpless by nature, and
whose profession required a more than 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 ha