I wanted her to exclaim, "I adore him! I worship him! He is glorious, wonderful!" I was also aware from an early date that, in an unobtrusive way, Hilda Wade was watching Sebastian, watching him quietly, with those wistful, earnest eyes, as a cat watches a mouse-hole; watching him with mute inquiry, as if she expected each moment to see him do something different from what the rest of us expected of him.

Slowly I gathered that Hilda Wade, in the most literal sense, had come to Nathaniel's, as she herself expressed it, "to be near Sebastian." Gentle and lovable as she was in every other aspect, towards Sebastian she seemed like a lynx-eyed detective.

She had some object in view, I thought, almost as abstract as his own--some object to which, as I judged, she was devoting her life quite as single-mindedly as Sebastian himself had devoted his to the advancement of science.
"Why did she become a nurse at all ?" I asked once of her friend, Mrs.
Mallet.

"She has plenty of money, and seems well enough off to live without working." "Oh, dear, yes," Mrs.Mallet answered.

"She is independent, quite; has a tidy little income of her own--six or seven hundred a year--and she could choose her own society.