Now that the mornings were nice—­she said with some animation—­she got up much earlier, and did her needlework first thing; she then “did out” the room.  There were mouse-holes in her room, and she had bought a trap.  She had caught a mouse last night.  She hadn’t liked to kill it; she had put it in a tin box, and let it go when she went out.  Quick to see that Hilary was interested in this, as well he might be, she told him that she could not bear to see cats hungry or lost dogs, especially lost dogs, and she described to him one that she had seen.  She had not liked to tell a policeman; they stared so hard.  Those words were of strange omen, and Hilary turned his head away.  The little model, perceiving that she had made an effect of some sort, tried to deepen it.  She had heard they did all sorts of things to people—­but, seeing at once from Hilary’s face that she was not improving her effect, she broke off suddenly, and hastily began to tell him of her breakfast, of how comfortable she was now she had got her clothes; how she liked her room; how old Mr. Creed was very funny, never taking any notice of her when he met her in the morning.  Then followed a minute account of where she had been trying to get work; of an engagement promised; Mr. Lennard, too, still wanted her to pose to him.  At this she gashed a look at Hilary, then cast down her eyes.  She could get plenty of work if she began that way.  But she hadn’t, because he had told her not, and, of course, she didn’t want to; she liked coming to Mr. Stone so much.  And she got on very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops.  She mentioned neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs.  In all this rigmarole, told with such obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never quite out of her eyes when they were fixed on Hilary.

This look got through the weakest places in what little armour Nature had bestowed on him.  It touched one of the least conceited and most amiable of men profoundly.  He felt it an honour that anything so young as this should regard him in that way.  He had always tried to keep out of his mind that which might have given him the key to her special feeling for himself—­those words of the painter of still life:  “She’s got a story of some sort.”  But it flashed across him suddenly like an inspiration:  If her story were the simplest of all stories—­the direct, rather brutal, love affair of a village boy and girl—­would not she, naturally given to surrender, be forced this time to the very antithesis of that young animal amour which had brought on her such, sharp consequences?

But, wherever her devotion came from, it seemed to Hilary the grossest violation of the feelings of a gentleman to treat it ungratefully.  Yet it was as if for the purpose of saying, “You are a nuisance to me, or worse!” that he had asked her to his study.  Her presence had hitherto chiefly roused in him the half-amused, half-tender feelings of one who strokes a foal or calf, watching its soft uncouthness; now, about to say good-bye to her, there was the question of whether that was the only feeling.