lived, things would have been different. Now she was thrown on the
world, and had to depend upon her own hard work. Then she gave way
to an hysterical sob, and Julian--who felt sure that the landlady
was listening at the door--could only beg her nervously not to be
so down-hearted.

"Whatever success I have," he said to her, "you will share it."

"If I thought so!" she sighed, looking down at the floor, and moving
the point of her umbrella up and down. Harriet had saturated her
mind with the fiction of penny weeklies, and owed to this training
all manner of awkward affectations which she took to be the most
becoming manifestations of a susceptible heart. At times she would
express herself in phrases of the most absurdly high-flown kind, and
lately she had got into the habit of heaving profound sighs between
her sentences. Julian was not blind to the meaning of all this. His
active employments during the past week had kept his thoughts from
brooding on the matter, and he had all but dismissed the trouble it
had given him. But this visit, and Harriet's demeanour throughout
it, revived all his anxieties. He came back from accompanying his
cousin part of her way home in a very uneasy frame of mind. What
could he do to disabuse the poor girl of the unhappy hopes she
entertained? The thought of giving pain to any most humble creature
was itself a pain unendurable to Julian. His was one of those
natures to which self-sacrifice is infinitely easier than the idea
of sacrificing another to his own desires or even necessities, a
vice of weakness often more deeply and widely destructive than the
vices of strength.

The visit having been paid, it was arranged that on the following