That we two should be friends, I knew. I should love her, and I believed that she might come to love me. But would ours be as the companionship of two of the same age? Should I ever be able to lay bare my inmost self, living so intensely and so differently to the Mary Haddon most people knew, to this young girl? She had spoken of her love to me; should I be able to speak of mine to her--the love which was deeper and stronger than a girl's love? It was with something akin to pain that I told myself no. Because it was not the love of a girl; because it was in its heights higher and in its depths deeper; because it was in its strength and weakness so much more human at eight-and-twenty than at seventeen, I could not talk about it to Lilian Farrar. The shadowy poetic sentiment which clings about a young girl's dream, the love which is more in love with love than with the lover, was not mine. I am an old woman now, writing a story for men and women, and therefore I will add that I have still quite as much romance and enthusiasm in my composition as I had at seventeen, which is an admission to make in these days; but at eight-and-twenty I persuaded myself that they were or ought to be dead. In truth, my eight-and-twenty years were pressing upon me rather too heavily for mental health. I could not take kindly to the idea that youth was gone, or recognise that the best of me was not necessarily gone with it. But there is no need for me to analyse and dwell upon my weaknesses here; they will be apparent enough as I go on, and will doubtless preach their own moral without my assistance. After luncheon, we returned to the pretty morning-room where I had first seen Mrs Tipper, and devoted the afternoon to making better acquaintance with each other. I began by telling my own little story (so far as it could be told, with Philip left out) about my dear mother's long illness, the struggles I had had to obtain a living when alone, and so forth, because I wished to appear in my true colours to these two, and above all, wished to get rid of the Haddons-of-Haddon tone in our future intercourse. Then dear old Mrs Tipper came out grandly with her little story respecting past ups and downs; not even omitting the fact that her deceased husband had been messenger (between ourselves, porter, my dear) in the firm where her brother rose to be chief, and how he had been pensioned by 'dear Jacob,' and ended his days in peace and comfort in a cottage of his own at Holloway, all the grandest visions of his youth realised.