"You're a lucky fellow," said Percival. "You don't know, and won't know, what loneliness is here."
"But how do _you_ come to know anything about it? That's what I can't understand. I thought your grandfather died last summer?"
"But I thought you were to come in for no end of money?"
[Illustration: "SHE DREW A SOFT WHITE CLOAK ROUND HER, AND WENT BY."--Page 173.]
"But surely he always allowed you a lot," said Lisle, still unsatisfied. "You never used to talk of doing anything."
"No, but I found I must. The fact is, I'm not on the best terms with my cousin at Brackenhill, and I made up my mind to be independent. Consequently, I'm a clerk--a copying-clerk, you understand--in a lawyer's office here--Ferguson's in Fisher street--and I lodge accordingly."
"Hammond knows all about it," the other went on, "but nobody else does."
"I was afraid there was something wrong," said Bertie--"wrong for you, I mean. From our point of view it is very lucky that circumstances have sent you here. But I hope your prospects may brighten; not directly--I can't manage to hope that--but soon."
Percival smiled. "Meanwhile," he said with a quiet earnestness of tone, "if there is anything I can do to help you or Miss Lisle, you will let me do it."
"Certainly," said Bertie. "We are going out now to look for a grocer. Suppose you come and show us one."
"I'm very much at your service. What are you looking at?"
"Why--you'll pardon my mentioning it--you have got the biggest smut on your left cheek that I've seen since I came here. They attain to a remarkable size in Brenthill, have you noticed?" Bertie spoke with eager interest, as if he had become quite a connoisseur in smuts. "Yes, that's it. I'll look Judith up, and tell her you are going with us."
Percival fled up stairs, more discomposed by that unlucky black than he would have thought possible. When he had made sure that he was tolerably presentable he waited by his open door till his fellow-lodgers appeared, and then stepped out on the landing to meet them. Miss Lisle, dressed very simply in black, stood drawing on her glove. A smile dawned on her face when her eyes met Percival's, and, greeting him in her low distinct tones, she held out her white right hand, still ungloved. He took it with grave reverence, for Judith Lisle had once touched his faint dream of a woman who should be brave with sweet heroism, tender and true. They had scarcely exchanged a dozen words in their lives, but he had said to himself, "If I were an artist I would paint my ideal with a face like that;" and the memory, with its underlying poetry, sprang to life again as his glance encountered hers. Percival felt the vague poem, though Bertie was at his elbow chattering about shops, and though he himself had hardly got over the intolerable remembrance of that smut.