"Yes, yes; I read a good deal of that sort of thing out in the colonies. But I have retained the goddess theory, so far at least. Mrs. Money seems to me a sort of divinity. Miss Money is a born saint; she ought to go about with a gilt plate round her head. Miss Lucy Money seems like a little angel of light. Are you smiling again? I do assure you these are my real feelings."
"I was not smiling at the idea, but only at the difference between it and the favorite ideas of most people at present, even of women about women."
"May I walk a little with you," Mr. Heron said, "or will you sit and rest here, if you are tired, and we will talk? Don't stand on formality and send me away, although I will go if you like, and not feel in the least offended. But if we might talk for a little, it would give me great pleasure. You said just now that you did not wish to be selfish. It will be very unselfish and very kind if you will let me talk to you a little. I felt very wretched when you came up—quite in a suicidal frame of mind."
"Oh, no! Pray don't speak in that way. You do not mean it I am sure."
"In one sense I do mean it—that is, it is quite true that I should not have thrown myself into the water or blown my brains out; that sort of thing seems to me like abandoning one's post without orders from headquarters. But I felt in the condition of mind when one can quite understand how such things are done, and would be glad if he were free to follow the example. For me that is a great change in itself," the young man added with some bitterness.
"What can I do for him?" Miss Grey asked herself mentally. "Nothing but to show him the view from the canal bridge. There is nothing else in my power."
"There is a very pretty view a short distance from this," she said; "a view from a bridge, and I am particularly fond of looking from bridges. Should you like to walk there?"
"I should like to walk anywhere with you," Victor Heron said, with a look of genuine gratefulness, which had not the faintest breath of compliment in it, and could only be accepted as frank truth.
Perhaps, if Miss Grey had been a town-bred girl, she might have hesitated about setting out for a companionable walk in the park with a young man who was almost a stranger to her. But, as it was, she appeared to herself to have all the right of free action belonging to one in a place of which the public opinion can in no wise touch her. She acted in London as freely as one speaks with a friend in a foreign hotel room, where he knows that the company around are unable to understand what he is saying. In this particular instance, however, Minola hardly thought about the matter at all. There was something in Heron's open and emotional way which made people almost at the first meeting cease to regard him as a stranger. Perhaps, if Minola had thought over the matter, she might have cited in vindication of her course the valuable authority of Major Pendennis, who, when asked whether Laura might properly take walks in the Temple Gardens with Warrington, eagerly said, "Yes, yes, begad, of course, you go out with him. It's like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody in the Gardens; and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of thing. Everybody walks in the Temple Gardens." Regent's Park, one would think, ought to come under the same laws. There are beadles there, too, or guardian functionaries of some sort, although it may be owned that in their walk to and from the canal bridge Heron and Minola encountered none of them.
It is doubtful whether Heron at least would have noticed such a personage even had they come in their way, for he talked nearly all the time, except when he paused for an answer to some direct question, and he seldom took his eyes from Minola's face. He was not staring at her, or broadly admiring her; nor, indeed, was there anything in his manner to make it certain that he was admiring her at all, as man conventionally is understood to admire woman. But he had evidently put Miss Grey into the place of a sympathetic and trusted friend, and he talked to her accordingly. She was amused and interested, and she now and then kept making little disparaging criticisms to herself, in order to sustain her place as the cool depreciator of man. But she was very happy for all that.