‘I am there very often,’ was her reply.
‘What great dome?’ asked Miss Harrow, with surprise.
‘That of the British Museum Reading-room,’ explained Jasper; ‘known to some of us as the valley of the shadow of books. People who often work there necessarily get to know each other by sight.
In the same way I knew Miss Yule’s father when I happened to pass him in the road yesterday.’
The three girls began to converse together, perforce of trivialities. Marian Yule spoke in rather slow tones, thoughtfully, gently; she had linked her fingers, and laid her hands, palms downwards, upon her lap—a nervous action. Her accent was pure, unpretentious; and she used none of the fashionable turns of speech which would have suggested the habit of intercourse with distinctly metropolitan society.
‘You must wonder how we exist in this out-of-the-way place,’ remarked Maud.
‘Rather, I envy you,’ Marian answered, with a slight emphasis.
The door opened, and Alfred Yule presented himself. He was tall, and his head seemed a disproportionate culmination to his meagre body, it was so large and massively featured. Intellect and uncertainty of temper were equally marked upon his visage; his brows were knitted in a permanent expression of severity. He had thin, smooth hair, grizzled whiskers, a shaven chin. In the multitudinous wrinkles of his face lay a history of laborious and stormy life; one readily divined in him a struggling and embittered man. Though he looked older than his years, he had by no means the appearance of being beyond the ripeness of his mental vigour.
‘It pleases me to meet you, Mr Milvain,’ he said, as he stretched out his bony hand. ‘Your name reminds me of a paper in The Wayside a month or two ago, which you will perhaps allow a veteran to say was not ill done.’
‘I am grateful to you for noticing it,’ replied Jasper.