“Don’t count upon me.  Patty and you will enjoy the day together, in any case.  Yes, I had rather have it so.  Narramore said just now he might look in to see me in the after’ noon.  But come over on Monday.  When does Patty’s train go from New Street?”

Eve was mute, gazing at the speaker as if she did not catch what he had said.  Patty answered for herself.

“Then you can either come to my place,” he continued, “or I’ll meet you at the station.”

Patty’s desire was evident in her face; she looked at Eve.

“We’ll come to you early in the afternoon,” said the latter, speaking like one aroused from reverie.  “Yes, we’ll come whatever the weather is.”

The young man shook hands with them, raised his hat, and walked away without further speech.  It occurred to him that he might overtake Narramore at the station, and in that hope he hastened; but Narramore must have left by a London and North-Western train which had just started; he was nowhere discoverable.  Hilliard travelled back by the Great Western, after waiting about an hour; he had for companions half-a-dozen beer-muddled lads, who roared hymns and costers’ catches impartially.

His mind was haunted with deadly suspicions:  he felt sick at heart.

Eve’s headache, undoubtedly, was a mere pretence for not accompanying Patty to-day.  She had desired to be alone, and—­this he discovered no less clearly—­she wished the friendship between him and Patty to be fostered.  With what foolish hope?  Was she so shallow-natured as to imagine that he might transfer his affections to Patty Ringrose? it proved how strong her desire had grown to be free from him.

The innocent Patty (was she so innocent?) seemed not to suspect the meaning of her friend’s talk.  Yet Eve must have all but told her in so many words that she was weary of her lover.  That hateful harping on “gratitude”!  Well, one cannot purchase a woman’s love.  He had missed the right, the generous, line of conduct.  That would have been to rescue Eve from manifest peril, and then to ask nothing of her.  Could he but have held his passions in leash, something like friendship—­rarest of all relations between man and woman—­might have come about between him and Eve.  She, too, certainly had never got beyond the stage of liking him as a companion; her senses had never answered to his appeal He looked back upon the evening when they had dined together at the restaurant in Holborn.  Could he but have stopped at that point!  There would have been no harm in such avowals as then escaped him, for he recognised without bitterness that the warmth of feeling was all on one side, and Eve, in the manner of her sex, could like him better for his love without a dream of returning it.  His error was to have taken advantage—­ perhaps a mean advantage—­of the strange events that followed.  If he restrained himself before, how much more he should have done so when the girl had put herself at his mercy, when to demand her love was the obvious, commonplace, vulgar outcome of the situation?  Of course she harped on “gratitude.”  What but a sense of obligation had constrained her?