"What do you want?" he asked curtly.
Shiel told him.
"You're too late," Hamar said. "I've engaged some one. If you'd called
earlier, there might have been some chance for you, as you look
tolerably intelligent. But it's no use now, so be off."
As Shiel left the room he caught Lilian Rosenberg looking at him; and
he saw that her eyes were full of sympathy.
The acquaintance, thus begun, ripened. She went to see his pictures,
they had tea together, and they spent many subsequent hours in each
other's company. And although Shiel saw in Lilian Rosenberg only a
rather prepossessing girl from whom, after cultivating her
acquaintance, he was hoping to learn the inner working of the Modern
Sorcery Company Ltd., with her it was different.
In Shiel, Lilian Rosenberg saw the qualities she had always been
seeking--the qualities she had almost despaired of ever finding--and
which she had so often declared existed only in fiction. He only
interested her, she argued; but she forgot that interest as well as
pity is akin to love--and that where the former leads, the latter
almost invariably follows.
"I don't believe you have enough to eat," she said to him one day.
"You are a perfect shadow. How do you exist if you have no private
means?"
"I just manage to exist, and that is all," Shiel laughed, and he spoke
the truth, his present state of semi-starvation having resulted from
the untoward events, which had happened prior to his application for
the post of clerk to the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd.
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