"I seem to you so disreputable?"

"Not exactly that," replied Eve thoughtfully. "But you seem
altogether a different person from what you seemed to her."

"Yes, I can understand that. And it gives me an opportunity for
saying that you, Miss Madeley, are as different as possible from the
idea I formed of you when I heard Mrs. Brewer's description."

"She described me? I should so like to hear what she said."

The changing of plates imposed a brief silence. Hilliard drank a
glass of wine and saw that Eve just touched hers with her lips.

"You shall hear that--but not now. I want to enable you to judge
me, and if I let you know the facts while dinner goes on it won't be
so tiresome as if I began solemnly to tell you my life, as people do
in novels."

He erred, if anything, on the side of brevity, but in the succeeding
quarter of an hour Eve was able to gather from his careless talk,
which sedulously avoided the pathetic note, a fair notion of what
his existence had been from boyhood upward. It supplemented the
account of himself she had received from him when they met for the
first time. As he proceeded she grew more attentive, and
occasionally allowed her eyes to encounter his.

"There's only one other person who has heard all this from me," he
said at length. "That's a friend of mine at Birmingham--a man