She did not answer him, but she took one of his hands in hers and pressed it to her cheek. His consolation had hardly touched that strange oppression which weighed upon her; and Julian, in high feather, and quite unaware that only his voice was heard by her, his words passing her by unheeded, had been talking at great length about all the happiness before them, when she said, in a hesitating, far-away voice: “Could you--could you come home with me this afternoon?” Julian paused a moment. The question was hardly the response his words had demanded. Then he said decisively: “Quite impossible, I am sorry to say. I would if I could, you know, dear, but it’s quite impossible!” She gave his hand a little quick pressure. “I know, of course!” she murmured gently. She paused a moment, and then said in a low voice, rather irrelevantly as it seemed: “Julian”--his name still came rather hesitatingly from her lips--“do you think--do you like Mrs. Jackson?” Mrs. Jackson was the name of the woman whose rooms Julian had taken for her, and he started slightly at the question. “She’s not a bad sort,” he said, with rather startled consideration. “At least, she seems all right. Isn’t she nice to you, Clemence? Don’t you like the rooms?” “Oh, yes! yes!” she said quickly, almost as though she reproached herself for saying anything that could suggest to him even a shadow of discontent on her part. “I like them so very, very much. It is only--I don’t know what exactly. Somehow, I don’t think Mrs. Jackson is quite a nice woman.” She had spoken the last words hesitatingly and with difficulty, almost as though they came from her against her will. Julian glanced at her quickly. “What makes you think that, Clemence?” he said, with judicial masterfulness. “Have you any reason, I mean?” But Clemence was hardly able to define, even in her own pure mind, what it was that jarred upon her in her landlady’s manner; and to Julian she was utterly unable to put her feelings into words. Her hasty disclaimer and her hesitating beginnings and falterings, however, served to remove the misgiving which had stirred him lest some knowledge of his own real life should have come to the woman’s knowledge. He was the readier to let himself be reassured and to dismiss the subject in that the train was slackening speed for the last time before reaching London, and he intended to move into a first-class smoking carriage at the approaching station. Julian was well aware of the risks of discovery involved in these journeys with Clemence; and though he faced them nonchalantly enough, he used wits with which no one who knew him only in his capacities of man about town and budding barrister would have credited him, to reduce them to a minimum. To be seen emerging from a third-class carriage at Victoria Station was a wholly unnecessary risk to run, and he avoided it accordingly.