Thirty children died in that village last
year and the year before."
There was silence a little.
"I wonder what I can do," said Faversham, at last, reflectively. "I have
been working out a number of new proposals--and I submit them to Mr.
Melrose to-night."
She looked wistfully at the speaker.
"Good luck! But Mr. Melrose is hard to move."
Faversham assented.
"The hope lies in his being now an old man--and anxious to get rid of
responsibilities. I shall try to show him that bad citizenship costs more
money than good."
"I hope--oh! I _hope_--you'll succeed!" she said fervently. Her emotion
infected him. He smiled down upon her.
"That ought to make me succeed! But of course I have no experience. I am
a townsman."
"You've always been a Londoner?"
"Practically, always. But I was tired of London before all this
happened--dying to get out of it."
And he began a short account of himself, more intimate than any he had
yet given her; to which Lydia listened with her open, friendly look,
perhaps a little shyer than before. And so different, instinctively, is
the way in which a man will tell his story to a woman, from that in which
he tells it to a man, that the same half-ironic, half-bitter narrative
which had repelled Tatham, attracted Lydia. Her sympathy rose at once to
meet it. He was an orphan, and till now lonely and unsuccessful;
tormented, too, by unsatisfied ideals and ambitions. Her imagination was
pitiful and quick; she imagined she understood.
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