hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. "He _was_!"

"Then get hold of him, and--if he's a gentleman--he'll prove for you,
to the hilt, that he wasn't."

It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden
suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the
next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater
strangeness yet. "He isn't a gentleman."

"Ah, lordy, lordy!" Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it
but only into the vague. "Oh, then, if he's a pig--!"

"You see there are only a few gentlemen--not enough to go round--and
that makes them count so!" It had thrust the girl herself, for that
matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose
he had no time to judge--aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since
he mightn't perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving
surface of their question. It fell upon Julia's face, fell with the
sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her
for all it immediately assumed.

"There are indeed very few--and one mustn't try _them_ too much!"
Mrs. Drack, who had supervened while they talked, stood, in monstrous
magnitude--at least to Julia's reimpressed eyes--between them: she was
the lady our young woman had descried across the room, and she had
drawn near while the interest of their issue so held them. We have
seen the act of observation and that of reflection alike swift in
Julia--once her subject was within range--and she had now, with all
her perceptions at the acutest, taken in, by a single stare, the