“Have you been working very hard, is the more important question?” he said, turning his eyes away from those candid brown ones, with, to do him justice, a certain passing shame in his own. “I’m afraid there’s no need to ask that! You look awfully tired, Clemence!” She shook her head with a pretty, brisk movement of reassurance. “Oh, no!” she said, “it’s not been at all a hard day. It never seems hard, you know, when we don’t have to stay late, unless something goes wrong in the work-room; and I don’t think that happens very often.” There was a simple, genuine content in the tone and manner in which the words were spoken, which, taken in conjunction with the colourlessness of the face, the tired look about the eyes, and the poor, worn dress, told a wonderful little story of patience and serenity of spirit. All that Julian Romayne knew of Clemence Brymer--the brief and very simple outline of her life as she had told it to him--was comprised in a few by no means uncommon facts. She was a “hand” in one of the big millinery establishments, and had worked at the same place for the last two years. Before that time she had lived from her childhood first with a married brother, and then, when he died, with his widow and children. From a certain touch of reserve in her manner of speaking of those particular years, Julian had gathered that they had been hard ones. The marriage of the brother’s widow, and her departure to Australia, had left Clemence alone in London. Her parents, she told Julian, had come from Cambridgeshire; and one of her faint recollections of her father, who had died when she was only five years old, was of sitting on his knee in their little attic room in London, and being told by him about his country home. Her mother had died when she was a baby; and all her scanty recollections seemed to centre round the father, who, as she said simply, had been “a very good man.”