o----"

He checked himself. Narramore looked at him with curiosity.

"It's a queer thing to me, Hilliard," he remarked, when his friend
turned away, "that you've kept so clear of women. Now, anyone would
think you were just the fellow to get hobbled in that way."

"I daresay," muttered the other. "Yes, it _is_ a queer thing. I have
been saved, I suppose, by the necessity of supporting my relatives.
I've seen so much of women suffering from poverty that it has got me
into the habit of thinking of them as nothing but burdens to a man."

"As they nearly always are."

"Yes, nearly always."

Narramore pondered with his amiable smile; the other, after a moment's
gloom, shook himself free again, and talked with growing exhilaration
of the new life that had dawned before him.

CHAPTER IV

Hilliard's lodgings--they were represented by a single room--commanded
a prospect which, to him a weariness and a disgust, would have seemed
impressive enough to eyes beholding it for the first time. On the
afternoon of his last day at Dudley he stood by the window and looked
forth, congratulating himself, with a fierceness of emotion which
defied misgiving, that he would gaze no more on this scene of his
servitude.

The house was one of a row situated on a terrace, above a muddy
declivity marked with footpaths. It looked over a wide expanse of waste
ground, covered in places with coarse herbage, but for the most part
undulating in bare tracts of slag and cinder. Opposite, some quarter of
a mile away, rose a lofty dome-shaped hill, tree-clad from base to
summit, and rearing above the bare branches of its topmost trees the
ruined keep of Dudley Castle. Along the foot of this hill ran the
highway which descends from Dudley town--hidden by rising ground on the
left--to the low-lying railway-station; there, beyond, the eye
traversed a great plain, its limit the blending of earth and sky in
lurid cloud. A ray of yellow sunset touched the height and its crowning
ruin; at the zenith shone a space of pure pale blue save for these
points of relief the picture was colourless and uniformly sombre. Far
and near, innumerable chimneys sent forth fumes of various density
broad-flung jets of steam, coldly white against the murky distance; wan
smoke from lime-kilns, wafted in long trails; reek of solid blackness
from pits and forges, voluming aloft and far-floated by the sluggish
wind.

Born at Birmingham, the son of a teacher of drawing,