From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not again tell the story of his
apparition, though the opportunities to do so now sought him as
constantly as he had formerly sought them. They offered him a fresh
temptation through the different perversions of the fact that had got
commonly abroad, but he resisted this temptation, and let the
perversions, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes amusingly, but always more
and more wildly, wide of the reality, take their course. In his reticence
he had the sense of atoning not only to the apparition but to Miss
Hernshaw too.

[Illustration: "'I'M AFRAID I'M RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT'"]

Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been carried off to Europe by
Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of
that continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of her ward.
Hewson heard that she was not to be gone a great while; it was well into
the winter when they started, and he understood that they were merely
going to Rome for the end of the season, and were then going to work
northward, and after June in London were coming home. He did not fail to
see her again before she left for any want of wishing, but he did not
happen to meet her at other houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she
had one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any function. In
thinking the point over it occurred to Hewson that this was so because he
was not wanted there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself; for it had
been in his brief experience of her that she let people know what she
wanted, and that with Mrs. Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her
name but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. If Miss
Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would
have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and