tram-car to the Bastille. By this time Patty had come to regard her
strange companion in a sort of brotherly light; no restraint
whatever appeared in her conversation with him. Eve, she told him,
had talked French with the chambermaid.

"And I fancy it was something she didn't want _me_ to understand."

"Why should you think so?"

"Oh, something in the way the girl looked at me."

"No, no; you were mistaken. She only wanted to show that she knew
some French."

But Hilliard wondered whether Patty could be right. Was it not
possible that Eve had gratified her vanity by representing her
friend as a servant--a lady's-maid? Yet why should he attribute
such a fault to her? It was an odd thing that he constantly regarded
Eve in the least favourable light, giving weight to all the ill he
conjectured in her, and minimising those features of her character
which, at the beginning, he had been prepared to observe with
sympathy and admiration. For a man in love his reflections followed
a very unwonted course. And, indeed, he had never regarded his love
as of very high or pure quality; it was something that possessed him
and constrained him--by no means a source of elevating emotion.

"Do you like Eve?" he asked abruptly, disregarding some trivial
question Patty had put to him.

"Like her? Of course I do."