Cecil Farquhar was a remarkably handsome man, nearer forty than thirty years of age. He was tall and graceful, with golden hair and the profile of a Greek statue; and, in addition to these palpable charms, he possessed the more subtle ones of a musical voice and a fascinating manner. He treated every woman, with whom he was brought into contact, as if she were a compound of a child and a queen; and he had a way of looking at her and speaking to her as if she were the one woman in the world for whom he had been waiting all his life. That women were taken in by this half-caressing, half-worshipping manner was not altogether their fault; perhaps it was not altogether his. Very attractive people fall into the habit of attracting, and are frequently unconscious of, and therefore irresponsible for, their success. "It is so good of you to let me be presented to you," he said to Elisabeth, as they walked through the crowded rooms in search of a seat; "you don't know how I have longed for it ever since I first saw pictures of yours on these walls. And my longing was trebled when I saw your glorious Pillar of Cloud, and read all that it was meant to teach." Elisabeth looked at him slyly through her long eyelashes. "How do you know what I meant to teach? Perhaps you read your own meanings into it, and not mine." Farquhar laughed, and Elisabeth thought he had the most beautiful teeth she had ever seen. "Perhaps so; but, do you know, Miss Farringdon, I have a shrewd suspicion that my meanings and yours are the same." "What meaning did you read into my picture?" asked Elisabeth, with the dictatorial air of a woman who is accustomed to be made much of and deferred to, as he found a seat for her in the vestibule, under a palm-tree. "I read that there was only one answer to the weary problems of labour and capital, and masses and classes, and employers and employed, and all the other difficulties that beset and threaten any great manufacturing community; and that this answer is to be found to-day--as it was found by the Israelites of old--in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and all of which that pillar is a sign and a sacrament." "Yes," replied Elisabeth, and her eyes shone like stars; "I meant all that. But how clever of you to have read it so correctly!" "I do not ask if you understood what my picture meant. I know you did; for it was to you, and women such as you, that I was speaking." "Yes; I understood it well enough," replied Elisabeth sadly. "I knew you would." "Poor little daughters of Philip! How much happier they would have felt if they had been just the same as all the other commonplace Jewish maidens, and had lived ordinary women's lives!"