Only I can't quite make out--" As Miss Hilary looked up to the name of the street the maid noticed what a glow came into her mistress's face, pale and tired as it was.
Just then a church clock struck the quarter hour.
"That must be St.Pancras.And this--yes, this is Burton Street, Burton Crescent." "I'm sure Missis wouldn't like to live there;" observed Elizabeth, eyeing uneasily the gloomy rez de-chaussee, familiar to many a generation of struggling respectability, where, in the decadence of the season, every second house bore the announcement "apartments furnished." "No," Miss Hilary replied, absently.

Yet she continued to walk up and down the whole length of the street; then passed out into the dreary, deserted looking Crescent, where the trees were already beginning to fade; not, however, into the bright autumn tint of country woods, but into a premature withering, ugly and sad to behold.
"I am glad he is not here--glad, glad!" thought Hilary, as she realized the unutterable dreariness of those years when Robert Lyon lived and studied in his garret from month's end to month's end--these few dusty trees being the sole memento of the green country life in which he had been brought up, and which she knew he so passionately loved.

Now she could understand, that "calenture" which he had sometimes jestingly alluded to, as coming upon him at times, when he felt literally sick for the sight of a green field or a hedge full of birds.

She wondered whether the same feeling would ever come upon her in this strange desert of London, the vastness of which grew upon her every hour.
She was glad he was away; yes, heart glad! And yet, if this minute she could only have seen him coming round the Crescent, have met his smile, and the firm, warm clasp of his hand-- For an instant there rose up in her one of those wild, rebellious outcries against fate, when to have to waste years of this brief life of ours, in the sort of semi-existence that living is, apart from the treasure of the heart and delight of the eyes, seems so cruelly, cruelly hard! "Miss Hilary." She started, and "put herself under lock and key" immediately.

"Miss Hilary; you do look so tired!" "Do I?
Then we will go and sit down in this baker's shop, and get rested and fed.