time she left the school her life had become almost as solitary
as that of the bat in the fable, alien both to bird and beast. She made
no intimate acquaintances there; her sordid and selfish dreams occupied
her too completely. Girls who admired her beauty were repelled by her
heartlessness, which they felt, but could not clearly define. Even
Azalea fell away from her, having found a stout and bald-headed railway
conductor, whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance. Maud
knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to
attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that
her father was a mechanic and poor. This thought did not tend to make
her home happier. She passed much of her time in her own bedroom,
looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble
wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple
and gold that made the north-west glorious at sunset. When she sat with
her parents in the evening, she rarely spoke. If she was not gazing in
the fire, with hard bright eyes and lips, in which there was only the
softness of youth, but no tender tremor of girlhood's dreams, she was
reading her papers or her novels with rapt attention. Her mother was
proud of her beauty and her supposed learning, and loved, when she
looked up from her work, to let her eyes rest upon her tall and
handsome child, whose cheeks were flushed with eager interest as she
bent her graceful head over her book. But Saul Matchin nourished a
vague anger and jealousy against her. He felt that his love was nothing
to her; that she was too pretty and too clever to be at home in his
poor house; and yet he dared not either reproach her or appeal to her
affections. His heart would fill with grief and bitterness as he gazed
at her devouring the brilliant pages of some novel of what she imagined
high life, unconscious of his glance, which would travel from her
neatly shod feet up to her hair, frizzed and banged down to her
eyebrows, "making her look," he thought, "more like a Scotch poodle-dog
than an honest girl." He hated those books which, he fancied, stole
away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where
she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as
the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered
than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between
their minds when she could delight in what s