She paused here for a moment, rather to rest after her climb than to look at what she had seen so often, then directed her steps to one of the houses within sight.  She pushed the door, and entered a little parlour, where a fire and a lamp made cheery welcome.  By the hearth, in a round-backed wooden chair, sat a grizzle-headed man, whose hard features proclaimed his relation to Eve, otherwise seeming so improbable.  He looked up from the volume open on his knee —­a Bible—­and said in a rough, kind voice: 

“I was thinkin’ it ’ud be about toime for you.  You look starved, my lass.”

“Yes; it has turned very cold.”

“I’ve got a bit o’ supper ready for you.  I don’t want none myself; there’s food enough for me here.”  He laid his hand on the book.  “D’you call to mind the eighteenth of Ezekiel, lass?—­’But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed——­’”

Eve stood motionless till he had read the verse, then nodded and began to take off her out-of-door garments.  She was unable to talk, and her eyes wandered absently.

CHAPTER XIX

After a week’s inquiry, Hilliard discovered the lodging that would suit his purpose.  It was Camp Hill; two small rooms at the top of a house, the ground-floor of which was occupied as a corn-dealer’s shop, and the story above that tenanted by a working optician with a blind wife.  On condition of papering the rooms and doing a few repairs necessary to make them habitable, he secured them at the low rent of four shillings a week.

Eve paid her first visit to this delectable abode on a Sunday afternoon; she saw only the sitting-room, which would bear inspection; the appearance of the bed-room was happily left to her surmise.  Less than a five-pound note had paid for the whole furnishing.  Notwithstanding the reckless invitation to Eve to share his fortunes straightway, Hilliard, after paving his premium of fifty guineas to the Birching Brothers, found but a very small remnant in hand of the money with which he had set forth from Dudley some nine months ago.  Yet not for a moment did he repine; he had the value of his outlay; his mind was stored with memories and his heart strengthened with hope.

At her second coming—­she herself now occupied a poor little lodging not very far away—­Eve beheld sundry improvements.  By the fireside stood a great leather chair, deep, high-backed, wondrously self-assertive over against the creaky cane seat which before had dominated the room.  Against the wall was a high bookcase, where Hilliard’s volumes, previously piled on the floor, stood in loose array; and above the mantelpiece hung a framed engraving of the Parthenon.

“This is dreadful extravagance!” she exclaimed, pausing at the threshold, and eying her welcomer with mock reproof.

“It is, but not on my part.  The things came a day or two ago, simply addressed to me from shops.”