“I suppose not; but it’s rather awful to think of what it will mean to her to lose him. And she’s so sympathetic and tender-hearted.” Hal stood a moment looking gravely at the fire—“you know, I think she’s the most splendid person I’ve ever known.” “Splendid!...” a trifle testily. “Why? Splendid seems an odd word to use.” “It’s the one that suits Ethel Hayward best of all. Anything else would be too commonplace. When I think what her life is—the endless struggle to make both ends meet—work morning, noon, and night—and on the top of it all the brother she adores a helpless, suffering invalid, it quite overawes me. If she were bitter and complaining it would be different, but she is nearly always cheerful and hopeful and ready to think of some one else’s troubles. And yet she isn’t goody-goody—nor what one describes as ‘worthy’; she’s just human through and through.” “She sometimes seems to me a little severe,” he said. “Severe!... Oh, Dudley, she is the kindest soul alive.” “Perhaps she was tired; but it seemed to me, considering Doris’s youth, she expected rather a lot of her.” “Ah!...” Hal turned away, and picked up an evening paper. The exclamation might have meant anything, yet Dudley half knew it meant that in some way Hal believed Doris had wilfully misrepresented her sister, and, naturally resenting the inference, he returned to his book and said no more. Hal lingered a little longer, passed one or two remarks on the evening news, told him of her day in the country, and then went to bed. Yet, in spite of her soreness towards Doris, something in her evening with Ethel had unaccountably cheered and refreshed her—the kindly praise, the warm-hearted affection, the sight of the strong, womanly face, unembittered by its heavy sorrow. Hal stood at her window, and glanced out over the City, and felt renewed in her determination to withstand Sir Edwin Crathie’s advances. She knew that he was treating her with a lack of respect he would not have dared to show a woman in his own circle. He was treating her as a City typist; and however much she wished to prolong it, she knew she owed it to herself to cut it adrift. And the next day, when the anticipated telephone call came, her resolution was firm and unshaken. “Tell the gentleman I am engaged,” she told the call boy. He came back again a moment later to know what time she would be disengaged, and she gave the message: “It is quite impossible to say. I have some most important work on hand.” The small boy grinned in a way that made Hal long to box his ears, but she returned to her work, and pretended not to see. At the other end of the wire the speaker sat back in his chair and muttered an oath; then for some moments he stared gloomily at his desk. “Damn it! I like her pluck,” ran his thoughts; “but I don’t mean to be put off like that. I’ve got to see her again somehow, if it’s only to prove I’m not the cad she thinks me.” CHAPTER XXIII