"Go, then: you can't miss it. I'll wait here for Miss Lisle, and we'll come and meet you if you are not back."
When Judith came out she looked round in some surprise: "What has become of Bertie, Mr. Thorne?"
"Gone to the bookseller's," said Percival: "shall we walk on and meet him?"
They went together down the gray, slushy street. The wayfarers seemed unusually coarse and jostling that evening, Percival thought, the pavement peculiarly miry, the flaring gaslights very cruel to the unloveliness of the scene.
"Mr. Thorne," Judith began, "I am glad of this opportunity. We haven't met many times before to-day."
She looked at him, a faint light of surprise in her eyes. "Ah! twice," she repeated. "But you know Bertie well. You used often to come at one time, when I was away?"
"Oh yes, I saw a good deal of Bertie," he replied, remembering how he had taken a fancy to the boy.
"And he used to talk to me about you. I don't feel as if we were quite strangers, Mr. Thorne."
"Indeed, I hope not," said Percival, eluding a baker's boy and reappearing at her side.
"I've another reason for the feeling, too, besides Bertie's talk," she went on. "Once, six or seven years ago, I saw your father. He came in one evening, about some business I think, and I still remember the very tone in which he talked of you. I was only a school-girl then, but I could not help understanding something of what you were to him."
"He was too good to me," said Percival, and his heart was very full. Those bygone days with his father, which had drifted so far into the past, seemed suddenly brought near by Judith's words, and he felt the warmth of the old tenderness once more.
"So I was very glad to find you here," she said. "For Bertie's sake, not for yours. I am so grieved that you should have been so unfortunate!" She looked up at him with eyes which questioned and wondered and doubted all at once.
But a small girl, staring at the shop-windows, drove a perambulator straight at Percival's legs. With a laugh he stepped into the roadway to escape the peril, and came back: "Don't grieve about me, Miss Lisle. It couldn't be helped, and I have no right to complain." These were his spoken words: his unspoken thought was that it served him right for being such a fool as to trust her father. "It's worse for you, I think, and harder," he went on; "and if you are so brave--"