and curly lamb which stood in a pasture of green
paint and possessed an underground squeak or baa. Finally, he returned
to Thorne. "You like waiting, don't you?" he said.

"I don't mind it."

"And I do: that's just the difference. Is there a stationer's handy?"

"At the end of the street, the first turning to the left."

"I want some music-paper: I can get it before Judith has done ordering
in her supplies if I go at once."

"Go, then: you can't miss it. I'll wait here for Miss Lisle, and we'll
come and meet you if you are not back."

When Judith came out she looked round in some surprise: "What has
become of Bertie, Mr. Thorne?"

"Gone to the bookseller's," said Percival: "shall we walk on and meet
him?"

They went together down the gray, slushy street. The wayfarers seemed
unusually coarse and jostling that evening, Percival thought, the
pavement peculiarly miry, the flaring gaslights very cruel to the
unloveliness of the scene.

"Mr. Thorne," Judith began, "I am glad of this opportunity. We haven't
met many times before to-day."

"Twice," said Percival.

She looked at him, a faint light of surprise in her eyes. "Ah! twice,"
she repeated. "But you know Bertie well. You used often to come at one
time, when I was away?"

"Oh yes, I saw a good deal of Bertie," he replied, remembering how he
had taken a fancy to the boy.

"And he used to talk to me about you. I don't feel as if we were quite
strangers, Mr. Thorne."

"Indeed, I hope not," said Percival, eluding a baker's boy and
reappearing at her side.

"I've another reason for the feeling, too, besides Bertie's talk," she
went on. "Once, six or seven years ago, I saw your father. He came in
one evening, about some business I think, and I still remember the
very tone in which he talked of you. I was only a school-girl then,
but I could not help understanding something of what you were to him."

"He was too good to me," said Percival, and his heart was very full.
Those bygone days with his father, which had drifted so far into the
past, seemed suddenly brought near by Judith's words, and he felt the
warmth of the old tenderness once more.

"So I was very glad to find you here," she said. "For Bertie's
sake, not for yours. I am so grieved that you should have been so
unfortunate!" She looked up at him with eyes which questioned and
wondered and doubted all at once.

But a small girl, staring at the shop-windows, drove a perambulator
straight at Per