"You think I ought not to use that word; I thank you for the gentle judgment," said George, his manner indescribably softened and deepened; "but if ever I am in a position to tell you--but why do I talk such nonsense? I am only a waif, a stray, thrown for a moment in your path, to be swept from it the next and forgotten." This was dangerous ground, and they both felt it. A chance meeting, a brief association which perhaps never ought to have been; and here was this girl, well brought up, in the strictest sense of the term, yielding to the dangerous charm of the stranger's society, and feeling her heart die within her as his words showed the prospect before her. Her complexion died too, for Clare's was a tell-tale face, on which emotion had irresistible power. George saw the sudden paleness, and she knew he saw it. "I--I hope not," she said, rather incoherently. "I--I think not. You are an artist and an author, you know." (How ashamed George felt, how abashed in the presence of this self-deluding innocence of hers!) "And I, as well as all the world, shall hear of you." "_You_, as well as all the world," he repeated, in a dreamy tone. "Well, perhaps so. I will try to think so, and to hope it will be--" He stopped; the gentleman's nature in him still existing, still ready at call, notwithstanding his degradation, withheld him from presuming on the position in which he found himself, and in which the girl's innocent impulsiveness had placed her. To him, with his knowledge of who she was, and who he was, with the curious relation of severance which existed between them, the sort of intimacy which had sprung up had not so much strangeness as it externally exhibited, and he had to remind himself that she did not share that knowledge, and therefore stood on a different level to his, in the matter. He determined to get off the dangerous ground, and there was a convincing proof in that determination that the tide had turned for the young man, that he had indeed resolved upon the better way. His revenge upon his stepfather lay ready to his hand; the unconscious girl made it plain to him that he had excited a strange and strong interest in her. It was not a bad initiation of the prodigal's project of reform that he renounced that revenge, and turned away from the temptation to improve his chance advantage into the establishment of an avowed mutual interest. This step he took by saying, gaily, "Then I have your permission to send you my first work, Miss Carruthers, and you promise it a place in that grand old library I had a glimpse of yesterday?"