much spirit as when he went “abroad,” after the fashion of Mr. Vetch of old, with a hat-box. He could say to himself quite without bitterness that of course she would profit by his absence to put her relations with Sholto on a comfortable footing; yet somehow, after all, at this moment, as her distant English face out-blossomed the nearer, the livid Parisian, it had not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It was the general brightness of Paris perhaps that made him see things sharp; at any rate he remembered with kindness something she had said to him the last time he saw her and that it 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 that she should then have the satisfaction of being his very oldest friend. “Oh well, I shan’t live for ever either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to ask if by chance he had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I might get smashed 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 inquiring 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,” she had answered simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness. Then she had added: “There’s one thing I can tell you, Mr. Robinson: that if ever any one was to do you a turn——!” And she had paused again, tossing back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by the plumes of a chieftainess, while Hyacinth asked what would occur in that contingency. “Well, there’d be _one_ left behind who would take it up!” she had announced; and in the tone of the declaration there had been something clear and brave. 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 large, free temperament many disparities were reconciled. XXX