after having been
out the most of the night, he saw two ladies on horseback approaching,
followed by a servant in livery: he liked to look at a pleasant sight,
and first his eye caught the horses, and he thought what fine animals
they were; then he glanced at the ladies. The one nearest bowed to him
and touched her hat: the action could not be called "fast;" still, it
piquantly broke the bounds of very exact stiff propriety. He hurriedly
roused himself to look in her face, which he had not thought of doing
till he saw her action, and lo! it was the face, with the smile, of the
girl with the amber beads!

Beautiful as she was, she might have been the head of the Medusa, for
Dr. Brunton felt suddenly as if turned to stone. When he went into his
house all chance of an hour's sleep was gone. He met his sister in the
passage: she stopped and said, "Oh, James, you must have passed the
Ladies Moor as you came home: did you notice Lady Louisa?--did you?"

"Yes," he said shortly.

"Well, allow that she excels your rustic beauty."

"I allow it," he said. "I'm going to bed: don't call me for an hour or
two unless it's something urgent."

Not that he wanted to sleep or could have slept, but he wanted to think:
he wanted to cast out the dream he had been dreaming, and from which he
had been roused so thoroughly. The girl, the peasant-girl that he had
purposed to take from her rude, coarse setting, that he had yearned to
love and protect while he lived,--she had disappeared like the mists of
the morning, and in her place was left a lady of rank and fashion, the
daughter of an earl, the sister of a duchess. How she must have been
laughing at him! how she had taken him in! He, whose very business it
was to observe, and who prided himself on his powers of observation, to
be so thoroughly deceived! Was he densely stupid, or was she
superlatively clever? He leaned to the last solution. No actual daughter
of a hind could have played the part better. Her language, both in the
pronunciation and accent, was perfect: she had even caught the trick of
phrase and idea natural to the peasantry; and she had neither underdone
it nor overdone it. She was not only perfectly beautiful, she was
excessively clever, down to twisting her hands in her apron, which she
was always doing, as if it had been a piece of rustic awkwardness, when
it was to hide them of course: if her hands had been visible, they would
at once have betrayed her. But he might as