"What do you want?" he asked curtly.
Shiel told him.
"You're too late," Hamar said. "I've engaged some one. If you'd called earlier, there might have been some chance for you, as you look tolerably intelligent. But it's no use now, so be off."
As Shiel left the room he caught Lilian Rosenberg looking at him; and he saw that her eyes were full of sympathy.
The acquaintance, thus begun, ripened. She went to see his pictures, they had tea together, and they spent many subsequent hours in each other's company. And although Shiel saw in Lilian Rosenberg only a rather prepossessing girl from whom, after cultivating her acquaintance, he was hoping to learn the inner working of the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd., with her it was different.
In Shiel, Lilian Rosenberg saw the qualities she had always been seeking—the qualities she had almost despaired of ever finding—and which she had so often declared existed only in fiction. He only interested her, she argued; but she forgot that interest as well as pity is akin to love—and that where the former leads, the latter almost invariably follows.
"I don't believe you have enough to eat," she said to him one day. "You are a perfect shadow. How do you exist if you have no private means?"
"I just manage to exist, and that is all," Shiel laughed, and he spoke the truth, his present state of semi-starvation having resulted from the untoward events, which had happened prior to his application for the post of clerk to the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd., and his subsequent acquaintance with Lilian Rosenberg.
Whilst John Martin had been ill, and he had helped at the Hall in Kings way, he had lived well. Gladys had taken care he was paid—not a big sum to be sure—but enough to keep him. But directly John Martin, in spite of Gladys's remonstrances, had resumed work, Shiel had been dismissed.
"I wish I could help you," John Martin said to him, "for I really feel grateful to you for all you have done, but to tell you the candid truth, I can't afford to pay any salaries. As you know, the receipts of the Hall are next to nothing; but the expenses continue just the same—rent, gas, and staff—all heavy items. Moreover, at your uncle's death, many of his creditors put in claims on the Firm for debts—debts he had incurred without either my sanction or knowledge—and it has been a serious drain on me to pay them off. In fact, my finances are now at such a low ebb that I cannot possibly do anything for you. If only the Modern Sorcery Company could be cleared off the scenes."