e quite well before the meal was ended, and yet
he had not asked many questions. He knew how Grace had met her at her
father's house--an odd, self-reliant, very pretty and youthful-looking
little creature, with the force and decision of half a dozen ordinary
women hidden in her small frame; how she had seemed to like him; how
their intimacy had grown; how his gentle, deep-rooted passion had grown
with it; how he had learned to understand that he had nothing to hope
for.

"I am a little fearful for the result of her first visit here," said
Grace, pushing his cup aside and looking troubled. "I cannot bear to
think of her being disappointed and disturbed by the half-savage state
in which these people live. She knows nothing of the mining districts.
She has never been in Lancashire, and they have always lived in the
South. She is in Kent now, with Mrs. Barholm's mother. And though I have
tried, in my short letters to her, to prepare her for the rough side of
life she will be obliged to see, I am afraid it is impossible for her to
realize it, and it may be a shock to her when she comes."

"She is coming to Riggan then?" said Derrick.

"In a few weeks. She has been visiting Mrs. Galloway since the Rector
gave up his living at Ashley wolde, and Mrs. Barholm told me to-day that
she spoke in her last letter of coming to them."

The moon was shining brightly when Derrick stepped out into the street
later in the evening, and though the air was somewhat chill it was by no
means unpleasant. He had rather a long walk before him. He disliked
the smoke and dust of the murky little town, and chose to live on its
outskirts; but he was fond of sharp exercise, and regarded the distance
between his lodging and the field of his daily labor as an advantage.

"I work off a great deal of superfluous steam between the two places,"
he said to Grace at the door. "The wind coming across Boggart Brow has a
way of scattering and cooling restless plans and feverish fancies, that
is good for a man. Half a mile of the Knoll Road is often enough to blow
all the morbidness out of a fellow."

To-night by the time he reached the corner that turned him upon the
Knoll Road, his mind had wandered upon an old track, but it had been
drawn there by a new object,--nothing other than Joan Lowrie, indeed.
The impression made upon him by the story of Joan and her outcast life
was one not easy to be effaced. The hardest miseries in the lot of a
class in whom he