some ladies approached.
Quarrier, who was acquainted with them, raised his hat and spoke a few
hasty words, after which he walked on by Glazzard's side.

"My opinion," he said, "is worth very little. I had no right whatever
to express it, having such slight evidence to go upon. It was double
impertinence. If _you_ can't be trusted to choose a wife, who could? I
see that--now that I have made a fool of myself."

"Don't say any more about it," replied the other, in a good-natured
voice. "We have lived in the palace of truth for a few minutes, that's
all."

"So you go to Sicily. There you will be in your element. Live in the
South, Glazzard; I'm convinced you will be a happier man than in this
mill-smoke atmosphere. You have the artist's temperament; indulge it to
the utmost. After all, a man ought to live out what is in him. Your
wedding will be here, of course?"

"Yes, but absolutely private."

"You won't reject me when I offer good wishes? There is no man living
who likes you better than I do, or is more anxious for your happiness.
Shake hands again, old fellow. I must hurry off."

So they parted, and in a couple of hours Glazzard was steaming towards
London.

He lay back in the corner of a carriage, his arms hanging loose, his
eyes on vacancy. Of course he had guessed Quarrier's opinion of the
marriage he was making; he could imagine his speaking to Lilian about
it with half-contemptuous amusement. The daughter of a man like
Mumbray--an unformed, scarcely pretty girl, who had inherited a sort of
fortune from some soap-boiling family--what a culmination to a career
of fastidious dilettantism! "He has probably run through all his
money," Quarrier would add. "Poor old fellow! he deserves better
things."

He had come to hate Quarrier. Yet with no vulgar hatred; not with the
vengeful rancour which would find delight in annihilating its object.
His feeling was consistent with a measure of justice to Denzil's
qualities, and even with a good deal of admiration; as it originated in
mortified vanity, so it might have been replaced by the original
kindness, if only some stroke of fortune or of power had set Glazzard
in his original position of superiority. Quarrier as an ingenuous young
fellow looking up to the older comrade, reverencing his dicta, holding
him an authority on most subjects, was acceptable, lovable; as a
self-assertive man, given to patronage (though perhaps unconsciously),
and succeeding in life as his