Millicent seemed to imply that he defended himself successfully when she said: “You express yourself like a reg’lar gentleman”—a speech to which he made no response. But he began to talk again afterwards, and, the evening having definitely set in, his companion took his arm for the rest of the way home. By the time he reached her door he had confided to her that in secret he wrote—quite as for publication; he was haunted with the dream of literary distinction. This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with the agreeable incoherence that characterised her, that she didn’t care anything for a man’s family if she liked the man himself; she thought families and that sort of rot were about played out. Hyacinth wished she would leave his origin alone; and while they lingered in front of her house before she went in he broke out: “I’ve no doubt you’re a jolly girl, and I’m very happy to have seen you again. But you’ve awfully little tact.” “_I_ have little tact? You should see me work off an old jacket!” He was silent a little, standing before her with his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good job you’re so lovely.” Millicent didn’t blush at this compliment, and probably didn’t understand all it conveyed, but she looked into his eyes a while, with all the smile that showed her teeth, and then came back more inconsequently than ever. “Come now, who are you?” “Who am I? I’m a wretched little ‘forwarder’ in the shop.” “I didn’t think I ever could fancy any one in that line!” she competently cried. Then she let him know she couldn’t ask him in, as she made it a point not to receive gentlemen, but she didn’t mind if she took another walk with him and she didn’t care if she met him somewhere—if it were handy enough. As she lived so far from Lomax Place she didn’t care if she met him half-way. So in the dusky by-street in Pimlico, before separating, they took a casual tryst; the most interesting, the young man felt, that had yet been—he could scarcely call it granted him. VI