comfortable footing; yet, somehow, at this moment, as her face came back to him amid the crowd of faces about him, it had not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It was the brilliancy of Paris, perhaps, that made him see things rosy; at any rate, he remembered with kindness something that she had said to him the last time he saw her and that had touched him exceedingly at the moment. He had happened to observe to her, in a friendly way, that now Miss Pynsent had gone she was, with the exception of Mr Vetch, the person in his whole circle who had known him longest. To this Millicent had replied that Mr Vetch wouldn’t live for ever, and then she should have the satisfaction of being his very oldest friend. “Oh, well, I shan’t live for ever, either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to inquire whether by chance he had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I might get killed in a row;” and when she broke out into scorn of his silly notion of turning everything up (as if any one wanted to know what a costermonger would like, or any of that low sort at the East End!) he amused himself with asking her if she were satisfied with the condition of society and thought nothing ought to be done for people who, at the end of a lifetime of starvation-wages, had only the reward of the hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave. “I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything, if ever you was to slip up,” Millicent answered, simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness. Then she added, “There’s one thing I can tell _you_, Mr Robinson: that if ever any one was to do you a turn—” And she paused again, tossing back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by a tiara, while Hyacinth inquired what would occur in that contingency. “Well, there’d be _one_ left behind who would take it up!” she announced; and in the tone of the declaration there was something brave and genuine. It struck Hyacinth as a strange fate—though not stranger, after all, than his native circumstances—that one’s memory should come to be represented by a shop-girl overladen with bracelets of imitation silver; but he was reminded that Millicent was a fine specimen of a woman of a type opposed to the whining, and that in her free temperament many disparities were reconciled. XXX