o her, "you will share it."

"If I thought so!" she sighed, looking down at the floor, and moving
the point of her umbrella up and down. Harriet had saturated her mind
with the fiction of penny weeklies, and owed to this training all
manner of awkward affectations which she took to be the most becoming
manifestations of a susceptible heart. At times she would express
herself in phrases of the most absurdly high-flown kind, and lately she
had got into the habit of heaving profound sighs between her sentences.
Julian was not blind to the meaning of all this. His active employments
during the past week had kept his thoughts from brooding on the matter,
and he had all but dismissed the trouble it had given him. But this
visit, and Harriet's demeanour throughout it, revived all his
anxieties. He came back from accompanying his cousin part of her way
home in a very uneasy frame of mind. What could he do to disabuse the
poor girl of the unhappy hopes she entertained? The thought of giving
pain to any most humble creature was itself a pain unendurable to
Julian. His was one of those natures to which self-sacrifice is
infinitely easier than the idea of sacrificing another to his own
desires or even necessities, a vice of weakness often more deeply and
widely destructive than the vices of strength.

The visit having been paid, it was arranged that on the following
Sunday Julian should meet his cousin at the end of Gray's Inn Road as
usual. On that day the weather was fine, but Harriet came out in no
mood for a walk. She had been ailing for a day or two, she said, and
felt incapable of exertion; Mrs. Ogle was away from home for the day,
too, and it would be better they should spend the afternoon together in
the house. Julian of course assented, as always, and they established
themselves in the parlour behind the shop. In the course of talk, the
girl made mention of an engraving Julian had given her a week or two
before, and said that she had had it framed and hung it in her bed-room.

"Do come up and look at it," she exclaimed; "there's no one in the
house. I want to ask you if you can find a better place for it. It
doesn't show so well where it is."

Julian hesitated for a moment, but she was already leading the way, and
he could not refuse to follow. They went up to the top of the house,
and entered a little chamber which might have been more tidy, but was
decently furnished. The bed was made in a slovenly way, the mantelpiec