face worries me. What a delightful looking tea-tray! Mr. Andrew,
you must really sit down with us. We ought to apologize for taking you
by storm like this, and I have not thanked you yet for being so kind to
my daughter." Andrew stepped back toward the cottage with a firm
refusal upon his lips, but Jeanne's hand suddenly rested upon the arm
of his coarse blue jersey.
"If you please, Mr. Andrew," she begged, "I want you to sit by me and
tell me how you came to live in so strange a place. Do you really not
mind the solitude?"
Andrew looked down at her for a moment without answering. For the first
time, perhaps, he realized the charm of her pale expressive face with
its rapid changes, and the soft insistent fire of her beautiful eyes.
He hesitated for a moment and then remained where he was, leaning
against the flag-staff.
"It is very good of you, miss," he said. "As to why I came to live
here, I do so simply because the house belongs to me. It was my
father's and his father's. We folk who live in the country make few
changes."
She looked at him curiously. The men whom she had known, even those of
the class to whom he might be supposed to belong, were all in a way
different. This man talked only when he was obliged. All the time she
felt in him the attraction of the unknown. He answered her questions
and remarks in words, the rest remained unspoken. She looked at him
contemplatively as he stood by her side with a tea-cup in his hand,
leaning still a little against the flag-staff. Notwithstanding his
rough clothes and heavy fisherman's boots, there was nothing about his
attitude or his speech, save in its dialect, to denote the fact that he
was of a different order from that in which she had been brought up.
She felt an immense curiosity concerning him, and she felt, too, that
it would probably never be gratified. Most men were her slaves from the
moment she smiled upon them. This one she fancied seemed a little bored
by her presence. He did not even seem to be thinking about her. He was
watching steadily and with somewhat bent eyebrows Cecil de la Borne and
Forrest. Something struck her as she looked from one to the other.
"I read once," she remarked, "that people who live in a very small
village for generation after generation grow to look like one another.
In a certain way I cannot conceive two men more unlike, and yet at that
moment there was something in your face which reminded me of Mr. De la
Borne."
He
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