she passed,
flashed frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches. There was
a vague dread in the sudden silence. She called to the old donkey, and
went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some overhanging peril,
unseen. She saw Margret coming up the road. There was a phaeton behind
Lois, and some horsemen: she jolted the cart off into the stones to let
them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He
did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance.
Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The
face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She
was dressed in yellow: the colour seemed jeering and mocking to the
girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not
know that it is the colour of shams, and that women like this are the
most deadly of shams. As the phaeton went slowly down, Margret came
nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling
the air. Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding
to the fence, as they met her. Holmes's cold, wandering eye turned on
the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised. Polston
called his eyes hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them
now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in
that flashing moment. The phaeton was gone in an instant, leaving her
alone in the road. One of the men looked back, and then whispered
something to the lady with a laugh. She turned to Holmes, when he had
finished, fixing her light, confusing eyes on his face, and softening
her voice.

"Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love. Were you, then,
so chivalric? Was it to have been a second romaunt of 'King Cophetua
and the Beggar Maid?'"

He met her look, and saw the fierce demand through the softness and
persiflage. He gave it no answer, but, turning to her, kindled into
the man whom she was so proud to show as her capture,--a man far off
from Stephen Holmes. Brilliant she called him,--frank, winning,
generous. She thought she knew him well; held him a slave to her
fluttering hand. Being proud of her slave, she let the hand flutter
down now somehow with some flowers it held until it touched his hard
fingers, her cheek flushing into rose. The nerveless, spongy
hand,--what a death-grip it had on his life! He did not look back once
at the motionless, dusty figure on the road. Wh