daughter of old Mr. Melville in Moray Place. Do you not mind Melville,
the wine merchant?' and specially impossible to ask this Miss Melville
unless one had some such certificate to attach to her vividness. But he
wished he could dance with her.

Ellen recalled him to the business of pity. She had thought of dances
for no more than a minute, though it had long been one of her dreams to
enter a ballroom by a marble staircase (which she imagined of a size and
steepness really more suited to a water-chute), carrying a black
ostrich-feather fan such as she had seen Sarah Bernhardt pythoning about
with in "La Dame aux Camélias." This hour she had dedicated to Mr.
Philip, and he knew it. She was thinking of him with an intentness which
was associated with an entire obliviousness of his personal presence,
just as a church circle might pray fervently for some missionary without
attempting to visualise his face; and though he missed this quaint
meaning of her abstraction, he was well content to watch it and nurse
his private satisfaction. He was still aware that he was Mr. Philip of
the firm, so he was not going to tell her that for two nights after he
had heard the decision of the Medical Examiners he had cried himself to
sleep, though he was fourteen past. But it was exquisite to know that if
he had told her she would have been moved to some glorious gesture of
pity. His imagination trembled at the thought of its glory as she turned
to him with a benignity that was really good enough, and said
diffidently, because her ambition was such a holy thing that she feared
to speak of his: "Still, there are lots of things for you to do. I've
heard...."

He was kindly and indulgent. "What have you heard?"

Ellen had, as her mother used to say, a great notion of politics. "Why,