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“Risen? And you sell baby-linen!”

Julian laughed in pure contentment. “You don’t understand,” he said. For a moment he looked at her as one debating with himself and then: “You have a right to understand. I will tell you.” He leaned across the counter, and as he spoke the eager passion of a devotee began to kindle in his eyes and vibrate through the tones of his voice. “The knowledge of a truth worked into your heart will lift you, eh, must lift you high? But base your life upon that truth, centre yourself about it, till your thoughts become instincts born from it! It must lift you still higher then; ah, how much higher! Well, I have done that. Yes, that’s why I am here. And I owe it all to you.”

Lady Tamworth repeated his words in sheer bewilderment. “You owe it all to me?”

“Yes,” he nodded, “all to you.” And with genuine gratitude he added, “You didn’t know the good that you had done.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she cried.

The bell tinkled over the shop-door and a woman entered. Lady Tamworth bent forward and said hastily, “I must speak to you.”

“Then you must buy something; what shall it be?” Fairholm had already recovered his self-possession and was drawing out one of the shelves in the wall behind him.

“No, no!” she exclaimed, “not here; I can’t speak to you here. Come and call on me; what day will you come?”

Julian shook his head. “Not at all, I am afraid. I have not the time.”

A boy came out from the inner room and began to get ready the shutters. “Ah, it’s Friday,” she said. “You will be closing soon.”

“In five minutes.”

“Then I will wait for you. Yes, I will wait for you.”

She paused at the door and looked at Julian. He was deferentially waiting on his customer, and Lady Tamworth noticed with a queer feeling of repugnance that he had even acquired the shopman’s trick of rubbing the hands. Those five minutes proved for her a most unenviable period. Julian’s sentence,–“I owe it all to you”–pressed heavily upon her conscience. Spoken bitterly, she would have given little heed to it; but there had been a convincing sincerity in the ring of his voice. The words, besides, brought back to her Sir John’s uncomfortable aphorism and freighted it with an accusation. She applied it now as a search-light upon her jumbled recollections of Julian’s courtship, and began to realise that her efforts during that time had been directed thoughtlessly towards enlarging her influence over him. If, indeed, Julian owed this change in his condition to her, then Sir John was right, and she had employed her influence to his hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove ineffectual. For Julian’s manner pointed now to an utter absence of feeling so far as she was concerned.

At last Julian came out to her. “You will leave here,” she cried impulsively. “You will come back to us, to your friends!”

“Never,” he answered firmly.

“You must,” she pleaded; “you said you owed it all to me.”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t you see? If you stay here, I can never forgive myself; I shall have ruined your life.”

“Ruined it?” Julian asked in a tone of wonder. “You have made it.” He stopped and looked at Lady Tamworth in perplexity. The same perplexity was stamped upon her face. “We are at cross-purposes, I think,” he continued. “My rooms are close here. Let me give you some tea, and explain to you that you have no cause to blame yourself.”

Lady Tamworth assented with some relief. The speech had an odd civilised flavour which contrasted pleasantly with what she had imagined of his mode of life.

They crossed the road and turned into a narrow side-street. Julian halted before a house of a slovenly exterior, and opened the door. A bare rickety staircase rose upwards from their feet. Fairholm closed the door behind Lady Tamworth, struck a match (for it was quite dark within this passage), and they mounted to the fourth and topmost floor. They stopped again upon a little landing in front of a second door. A wall-paper of a cheap and offensive pattern, which had here and there peeled from the plaster, added, Lady Tamworth observed, a paltry air of tawdriness to the poverty of the place. Julian fumbled in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and stepped aside for his companion to enter. Following her in, he lit a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece and a brass lamp in the corner of the room. Lady Tamworth fancied that unawares she had slipped into fairyland; so great was the contrast between this retreat and the sordid surroundings amidst which it was perched. It was furnished with a dainty, and almost a feminine luxury. The room, she could see, was no more than an oblong garret; but along one side mouse-coloured curtains fell to the ground in folds from the angle where the sloping roof met the wall; on the other a cheerful fire glowed from a hearth of white tiles and a kettle sang merrily upon the hob. A broad couch, piled with silk cushions occupied the far end beneath the window, and the feet sank with a delicate pleasure into a thick velvety carpet. In the centre a small inlaid table of cedar wood held a silver tea-service. The candlesticks were of silver also, and cast in a light and fantastic fashion. The solitary discord was a black easel funereally draped.