e held it, Bates felt compunction that it was not something finer
and to his idea prettier, for he did not like the colour. He decided
that he would purchase something better for her as soon as possible. He
followed her into the house.

CHAPTER III.

Night, black and cold, settled over the house that had that day for the
first time been visited by death. Besides the dead man, there were now
three people to sleep in it: an old woman, whose failing brain had
little of intelligence left, except such as showed itself in the
everyday habits of a long and orderly life; the young girl, whose mind
slow by nature in reaching maturity and retarded by the monotony of her
life, had not yet gained the power of realising its own deeper
thoughts, still less of explaining them to another; and this man, Bates,
who, being by natural constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain
of the sight of illness and death which he had just undergone, was not
in the best condition to resist the morbid influences of unhappy
companionship.

The girl shed tears as she moved about sullenly. She would not speak to
Bates, and he did not in the least understand that, sullen as she was,
her speechlessness did not result from that, but from inability to
reduce to any form the chaotic emotions within her, or to find any
expression which might represent her distress. He could not realise that
the childish mind that had power to converse for trivial things had, as
yet, no word for the not-trivial; that the blind womanly emotion on
which he had trodden had as yet no counterpart in womanly thought, which
might have formed excuses for his conduct, or at least have comprehended
its simplicity. He only felt uneasily that her former cause of
contention with him, her determination, sudden as her father's death, to
leave the only home she possessed, was now enforced by her antagonism to
the suggestion he had made of a future marriage, and he felt increasing
annoyance that it should be so. Naturally enough, a deep undercurrent of
vexation was settling in his mind towards her for feeling that
antagonism, but he was vexed also with himself for having suggested the
fresh source of contest just now to complicate the issue between them as
to whether she should remain where she was, at any rate for the present.
Remain she must; he was clear upon that point. The form of his religious
theories, long held in comparative isolation from mankind, convinced
him, wheth