“While Mr. Stone is like this he misses you. You will come, then, at present, please, so long as Hughs is in prison. How do you like your room?”
The little model answered simply: “Not very much.”
“It's lonely there. I shan't mind, now I'm coming here again.”
“Only for the present,” was all Hilary could find to say.
“Mrs. Hughs' baby's to be buried to-morrow,” she said suddenly.
“In Brompton Cemetery. Mr. Creed's going.”
“Mr. Creed's going to start at half-past nine.”
“I should like to go myself,” said Hilary.
A gleam of pleasure passing across her face was instantly obscured behind the cloud of her stolidity. Then, as she saw Hilary move nearer to the door, her lip began to droop.
The little model flushed and quivered. 'You don't even look at me,' she seemed to say; 'you haven't spoken kindly to me once.' And suddenly she said in a hard voice:
“Now I shan't go to Mr. Lennard's any more.”
Triumph at attracting his attention, fear of what she had admitted, supplication, and a half-defiant shame--all this was in her face.
“I didn't care any more when you told me I wasn't to come here.”
“I haven't done anything wrong,” she said, with tears in her voice.
“Yes, yes,” said Hilary; “it's all right.”
“I don't care what he thinks; I won't go again so long as I can come here.”
“Well, well,” he said, and opened the front door.
The little model, tremulous, like' a flower kissed by the sun after rain, went out with a light in her eyes.
The master of the house returned to Mr. Stone. Long he sat looking at the old man's slumber. “A thinker meditating upon action!” So might Hilary's figure, with its thin face resting on its hand, a furrow between the brows, and that painful smile, have been entitled in any catalogue of statues.
Following out the instinct planted so deeply in human nature for treating with the utmost care and at great expense when dead those, who, when alive, have been served with careless parsimony, there started from the door of No. 1 in Hound Street a funeral procession of three four-wheeled cabs. The first bore the little coffin, on which lay a great white wreath (gift of Cecilia and Thyme). The second bore Mrs. Hughs, her son Stanley, and Joshua Creed. The third bore Martin Stone. In the first cab Silence was presiding with the scent of lilies over him who in his short life had made so little noise, the small grey shadow which had crept so quietly into being, and, taking his chance when he was not noticed, had crept so quietly out again. Never had he felt so restful, so much at home, as in that little common coffin, washed as he was to an unnatural whiteness, and wrapped in his mother's only spare sheet. Away from all the strife of men he was Journeying to a greater peace. His little aloe-plant had flowered; and, between the open windows of the only carriage he had ever been inside, the wind--which, who knows? he had perhaps become--stirred the fronds of fern and the flowers of his funeral wreath. Thus he was going from that world where all men were his brothers.