Elizabeth bade him good-night when she reached the gate of No. 6, where the hall door stood open—putting her warm, strong hand with motherly benevolence into his.
"Good-night, Miss King. I am so glad to have seen you," he responded, glaring fiercely at the balcony and the blank window overhead. "And—and you will return that call, won't you?"
"O yes—of course. We will walk there on Monday, as we come home from the Library. We are able to find our way about in Melbourne very well now, with the help of the map you were so kind as to give us when we first came. I can't tell you how useful that has been."
So, with mutual friendship and goodwill, they parted—Elizabeth to join her sisters upstairs, where one was already setting the tea-kettle to boil on the gas stove, and the other spreading a snow-white cloth on the sitting-room table—Paul Brion to get half-an-hour's work and a hasty dinner before repairing to the reporters' gallery of "the House."
He did not see them again for a long time, and the first news he heard of them was from Mrs. Aarons, whom he chanced to meet when she was shopping one fine morning in Collins Street.
"You see, I remembered my promise," she said, when matters of more personal moment had been disposed of; "I went to see those extraordinary protégées of yours."
"Extraordinary—how extraordinary?" he inquired stiffly.
"Well, I put it to you—are they not extraordinary?"
He was silent for a few seconds, and the points of his moustache went up a little. "Perhaps so—now you mention it," he said. "Perhaps they are unlike the—the usual girl of the period with whom we are familiar. But I hope you were favourably impressed with your visit. Were you?"
"No, I wasn't. I will be frank with you—I wasn't. I never expected to find people living in that manner—and dressing in that manner. It is not what I am used to."