"Oh, how do you know, Mr. Murray? Do you think I am such a—fool? Well! it would be like a fool to dream of that, when there is next to no money at all; you might forgive a child for being so silly, but a woman grown-up, a person that ought to know better——"
He kept looking at her, with a little moisture in his eyes.
"I wish I were a magician," he said; and then, with one of his outbursts of confidence, which, having no previous clue to guide them, nobody understood—"What it would have been," he said, clasping his hands together, "if I had come here two years ago!"
Lilias looked at him with extreme surprise. She thought he had suddenly grown tired, as people so often do, of discussing the desires of others, and had plunged back thus abruptly into his own.
"If you had come here?" she said, with a little wonder. "Has Murkley, then, something to do with you too?"
He did not make her any reply; but, after a while, said, faltering slightly,
"I hope that—Miss Jean—is well. I hope it is not presumption, too much familiarity, to call her so."
"Oh, everybody calls her Miss Jean," said Lilias. "There is no over-familiarity. She is so happy with your music; she plays it half the day, and then she says she is not worthy to play it, that she is not fit to be listened to after you."
"I think," said Lewis, "that there can be no music that she is not worthy to play, not if it were the angel-music straight out of heaven."
"And did you see that, so little as you have known of her?" cried Lilias, gratefully. "Ah, then I can see what she finds in you, for you must be one that can understand. Do you know what Margaret says of Jean?—that she is unspotted from the world."