ng-woman received
delightedly the advances of Gil Blas, believing him to be a gentleman
of fortune, and how Gil Blas paid great court to the waiting-woman,
believing her to be a lady of rank. The pair of friends in Regent's
Park were drawn together by exactly opposite impulses: each believed
the other poor and unfriended. Minola was under the impression that she
was giving her sympathy to a ruined and unhappy young man, who had
failed in life almost at the very beginning, and was now friendless in
stony-hearted London. Victor Heron was convinced that his companion was
a poor orphan girl, who had been sent down by misfortune from a
position of comfort, or even wealth, to earn her bread by some sort of
intellectual labor, while she lived in a small back room in a depressed
and mournful quarter of London.

He told her the story of his grievance; it may be that he even told her
some parts of it more than once. It was a strange sensation to her, as
she walked on the soft green turf, in the silver gray atmosphere, to
hear this young man, who seemed to have lived so bold and strange a
life, appealing to her for an opinion as to the course he ought to
pursue to have his cause set right. The St. Xavier's Settlements do not
geographically count for much, and politically they count for still
less. But when Mr. Heron told of his having been administrator and
commandant there; of his having made treaties with neighboring kings
(she knew they were only black kings); of his having tried to put down
slavery, and to maintain what he persisted in believing to be the true
honor of England; of war made on him, and war made by him in
return--while she listened to all this, it is no wonder if our romantic
girl from Duke's Keeton sometimes thought she was conversing with one
of the heroes and master-spirits of the time. He made the whole story
very clear to her, and she thoroughly understood it, although her
imagination and her senses were sometimes disturbed by the tropic glare
which seemed to come over the places and events he described. At last
they actually came to be standing on the canal bridge, and neither
looked at the view they had come to see.

"Now what do you advise?" Heron said, after having several times
impressed some particular point on her. "I attach great importance to a
woman's advice. You have instincts, and all that, which we haven't; at
least so everybody says. Would you let this thing drop altogether, and
try some oth