"Strong?"
"Well liked, respectable, a likely kind of man to get good Conservative support if he stood for Keeton? You don't know, perhaps?"
"Yes, I think I do know. I believe he wishes to get into Parliament, and I am sure he is thought highly of. He is a very good man—a man of very high character," she added emphatically, anxious to repair the mental wrong doing of thinking him ridiculous and tiresome.
Just at this moment Mr. Heron rose to take his leave, and Mr. Money left the room with him, so that the conversation with Miss Grey was broken off. Then Lucy came to Nola again, and Nola was surrounded by the three women, who began to lay out various schemes for seeing her often and making London pleasant to her. Much as our lonely heroine loved her loneliness, she was greatly touched by their spontaneous kindness, but she was alarmed by it too.
A card was brought to Mrs. Money, who passed it on to Lucy.
"Oh, how delightful!" Lucy exclaimed. "So glad he has come, mamma. Nola, dear, a poet—a real poet!"
But Nola would not prolong her visit that day even for a poet. A very handsome, tall, dark-haired man, who at a distance seemed boyishly young, and when near looked worn and not very young, was shown in. For the moment or two that she could see him, Minola thought she had never seen so self-conceited and affected a creature. She did not hear his name nor a word he said, but his splendid, dark eyes, deeply set in hollows, took in every outline of her face and form. She thought him the poet of a schoolgirl's romance made to order.
Minola tore herself from the clinging embraces of Lucy, with less difficulty, perhaps, because of the poet's arrival, to whose society Lucy was clearly anxious to hasten back. It so happened that Mr. Money had kept Mr. Heron for a few minutes in talk, and the result was that exactly as Miss Grey reached the door Mr. Heron arrived there too. They both came out together, and in a moment they were in the gray atmosphere, dun lines of houses, and twinkling gaslights of Victoria street. Minola would much rather have been there alone.
Victor Heron, however, was full of the antique ideas of man's chivalrous duty and woman's sweet dependence, which still lingered in the out-of-the-way colony where he had spent so much of his time. Also, it must be owned that he had not yet quite got rid of the sense of responsibility and universal dictatorship belonging to the chief man in a petty commonwealth. For some time after his return to London he could hardly see an omnibus horse fall in the street without thinking it was an occasion which called for some intervention on his part. Therefore, when Miss Grey and he stood in the street together Mr. Heron at once assumed that the young woman must, as a matter of course, require his escort and protection.
He calmly took his place at her side. Miss Grey was a little surprised, but said nothing, and they went on.