tes Hilliard
followed, glanced along the carriages till he saw where the girls were
seated, and took his own place. He wore a suit which had been new on
his first arrival in London, good enough in quality and cut to give his
features the full value of their intelligence; a brown felt hat, a
russet necktie, a white flannel shirt. Finding himself with a talkative
neighbour in the carriage, he chatted freely. As soon as the train had
started, he lit his pipe and tasted the tobacco with more relish than
for a long time.

On board the steamer Eve kept below from first to last. Patty walked
the deck with Hilliard, and vastly to her astonishment, achieved the
voyage without serious discomfort. Hilliard himself, with the sea wind
in his nostrils, recovered that temper of buoyant satisfaction which
had accompanied his first escape from London. He despised the weak
misgivings and sordid calculations of yesterday. Here he was, on a
Channel steamer, bearing away from disgrace and wretchedness the woman
whom his heart desired. Wild as the project had seemed to him when
first he conceived it, he had put it into execution. The moment was
worth living for. Whatever the future might keep in store for him of
dreary, toilsome, colourless existence, the retrospect would always
show him this patch of purple--a memory precious beyond all the
possible results of prudence and narrow self-regard.

The little she-Cockney by his side entertained him with the flow of her
chatter; it had the advantage of making him feel a travelled man.

"I didn't cross this way when I came before," he explained to her.
"From Newhaven it's a much longer voyage."

"You like the sea, then?"

"I chose it because it was cheaper--that's all."

"Yet you're so extravagant now," remarked Patty, with eyes that
confessed admiration of this quality.

"Oh, because I am rich," he answered gaily. "Money is nothing to me."

"Are you really rich? Eve said you weren't."

"Did she?"

"I don't mean she said it in a disagreeable way. It was last night. She
thought you were wasting your money upon us."

"If I choose to waste it, why not? Isn't there a pleasure in doing as
you like?"

"Oh, of course there is," Patty assented. "I only wish I had the
chance. But it's awfully jolly, this! Who'd have thought, a week ago,
that I should be going to Paris? I have a feeling all the time that I
shall wake up and find I've been dreaming."

"Suppose you go down and see whether Eve