"I only brought these things here because they're nicely bound and fill up the shelf," he said. "Not much use in a lawyer's office, you know!" He glanced from the volume to her, and from her to the volume. "Ah! Miss Miranda! Yes! Well! It isn't so wonderful as all that. My father used to give her lessons in French. This Hugo was his. He thought a great deal of it." Mr. Cannon's pose exhibited pride, but it was obvious that he did not share his father's taste. His tone rather patronized his father, and Hugo too. As he let the pages of the book slip by under his thumb, he stopped, and with a very good French accent, quite different from Hilda's memory of Miss Miranda's, murmured in a sort of chanting--"_Dieu qui sourit et qui donne_." "That's the very one!" cried Hilda. "Ah! There you are then! You see--the bookmark was at that page." Hilda had not noticed the thin ribbon almost concealed in the jointure of the pages. "I wouldn't be a bit astonished if my father had lent her this very book! Curious, isn't it?" It was. Nevertheless, Hilda felt that his sense of the miraculousness of life was not so keen as her own; and she was disappointed. "I suppose you're very fond of reading?" he said. "No, I'm not," she replied. Her spirit lifted a little courageously, to meet his with defiance, like a ship lifting its prow above the threatening billow. Her eyes wavered, but did not fall before his. "Really! Now, I should have said you were a great reader. What do you do with yourself?" He now spoke like a brother, confident of a trustful response. "I just waste my time," she answered coldly. She saw that he was puzzled, interested, and piqued, and that he was examining her quite afresh. "Well," he said shortly, after a pause, adopting the benevolent tone of an uncle or even a great-uncle, "you'll be getting married one of these days." "I don't want to get married," she retorted obstinately, and with a harder glance. "Then what do you want?" "I don't know." She discovered great relief, even pleasure, in thus callously exposing her mind to a stranger. Tapping his teeth with one thumb, he gazed at her, apparently in meditation upon her peculiar case. At last he said: "I tell you what you ought to do. You ought to go in for phonography." "Phonography?" She was at a loss. "Yes; Pitman's shorthand, you know." "Oh! shorthand--yes. I've heard of it. But why?" "Why? It's going to be the great thing of the future. There never was anything like it!" His voice grew warm and his glance scintillated. And now Hilda understood her mother's account of his persuasiveness; she felt the truth of that odd remark that he could talk the hind leg off a horse. "But does it lead to anything?" she inquired, with her strong sense of intrinsic values.