A long silence followed. They passed out of Russell into Woburn Square. Night was now darkening the latest tints of the sky, and the lamps shone golden against dusty green. At one of the houses in the narrow square festivities were toward; carriages drew up before the entrance, from which a red carpet was laid down across the pavement; within sounded music. "Does this kind of thing excite any ambition in you?" Hilliard asked, coming to a pause a few yards away from the carriage which was discharging its occupants. "Yes, I suppose it does. At all events, it makes me feel discontented." "I have settled all that with myself. I am content to look on as if it were a play. Those people have an idea of life quite different from mine. I shouldn't enjoy myself among them. You, perhaps, would." "I might," Eve replied absently. And she turned away to the other side of the square. "By-the-bye, you _have_ a friend in Paris. Do you ever hear from her?" "She wrote once or twice after she went back; but it has come to an end." "Still, you might find her again, if you were there." Eve delayed her reply a little, then spoke impatiently. "What is the use of setting my thoughts upon such things? Day after day I try to forget what I most wish for. Talk about yourself, and I will listen with pleasure; but never talk about me." "It's very hard to lay that rule upon me. I want to hear you speak of yourself. As yet, I hardly know you, and I never shall unless you----" "Why should you know me?" she interrupted, in a voice of irritation. "Only because I wish it more than anything else, I have wished it from the day when I first saw your portrait." "Oh! that wretched portrait! I should be sorry if I thought it was at all like me." "It is both like and unlike," said Hilliard. "What I see of it in your face is the part of you that most pleases me." "And that isn't my real self at all." "Perhaps not. And yet, perhaps, you are mistaken. That is what I want to learn. From the portrait, I formed an idea of you. When I met you, it seemed to me that I was hopelessly astray; yet now I don't feel sure of it." "You would like to know what has changed me from the kind of girl I was at Dudley?" "_Are_ you changed?" "In some ways, no doubt. You, at all events, seem to think so." "I can wait. You will tell me all about it some day." "You mustn't take that for granted. We have made friends in a sort of way just because we happened to come from the same place, and know the same people. But----" He waited. "Well, I was going to say that there's no use in our thinking much about each other." "I don't ask you to think of me. But I shall think a great deal about you for long enough to come." "That's what I want to prevent." "Why?" "Because, in the end, it might be troublesome to me." Hilliard kept silence awhile, then laughed. When he spoke again, it was of things indifferent natures. CHAPTER XI