One characteristic peculiarity of this sudden and singular acquaintanceship ought to be mentioned. When people still read "Gil Blas" they would have remembered at once how the waiting-woman received delightedly the advances of Gil Blas, believing him to be a gentleman of fortune, and how Gil Blas paid great court to the waiting-woman, believing her to be a lady of rank. The pair of friends in Regent's Park were drawn together by exactly opposite impulses: each believed the other poor and unfriended. Minola was under the impression that she was giving her sympathy to a ruined and unhappy young man, who had failed in life almost at the very beginning, and was now friendless in stony-hearted London. Victor Heron was convinced that his companion was a poor orphan girl, who had been sent down by misfortune from a position of comfort, or even wealth, to earn her bread by some sort of intellectual labor, while she lived in a small back room in a depressed and mournful quarter of London.
He told her the story of his grievance; it may be that he even told her some parts of it more than once. It was a strange sensation to her, as she walked on the soft green turf, in the silver gray atmosphere, to hear this young man, who seemed to have lived so bold and strange a life, appealing to her for an opinion as to the course he ought to pursue to have his cause set right. The St. Xavier's Settlements do not geographically count for much, and politically they count for still less. But when Mr. Heron told of his having been administrator and commandant there; of his having made treaties with neighboring kings (she knew they were only black kings); of his having tried to put down slavery, and to maintain what he persisted in believing to be the true honor of England; of war made on him, and war made by him in return--while she listened to all this, it is no wonder if our romantic girl from Duke's Keeton sometimes thought she was conversing with one of the heroes and master-spirits of the time. He made the whole story very clear to her, and she thoroughly understood it, although her imagination and her senses were sometimes disturbed by the tropic glare which seemed to come over the places and events he described. At last they actually came to be standing on the canal bridge, and neither looked at the view they had come to see.