rentiating from her fellow villagers was a matter
of mild advertisement. She made her living as a dressmaker. She was
Barnriff's leading and only _modiste_.

The boy at her side continued his amusement at the puppy's expense. He
held it in his two hands and squeezed its little body until the poor
creature gasped and retched. Then he swung it to and fro by its
diminutive tail. Then he threw it up in the air, making it turn a
somersault, and catching it again clumsily.

All this he did in a mild, emotionless manner. There was no boyish
interest or amusement in it. Just a calm, serious immobility that gave
one the impression of a painting by one of the old European masters.

Elia was Eve Marsham's crippled brother. He was seven years younger
than she, and was just about to turn sixteen. In reality he was more
than a cripple. He was a general deformity, a deformity that somehow
even reached his brain. By this it must not be imagined that he was an
idiot, or lacking in intelligence in any way, but he had some curious
mental twists that marked him as something out of the normal. His
chief peculiarity lay in his dread of pain to himself. An ache, a
trifling bruise, a mere scratch upon himself, would hurl him into a
paroxysm of terror which frequently terminated in a fit, or, at least,
convulsions of a serious nature. This drove the girl, who was his only
living relative, to great pains in her care of him, which, combined
with an almost maternal love for him, kept her on a rack of
apprehension for his well-being.

He had another strange side to his character, and one of which
everybody but Eve was aware. He possessed a morbid love for horror,
for the sufferings of others. He had been known to sit for hours with
a sick man in the village who was suffering agonies of rheumatism, for
the mere delight of drawing from him details of the pains he was
enduring, and reveling in the horror of the description with ghoulish
delight.

When Restless, the carpenter, broke his leg the boy was always around.
And when the wretched man groaned while they set it, his face was a
picture of rapt fascination. To Eve his visits on such occasions were
a sign of his sympathetic nature, and she encouraged him because she
did not know the real meaning of them. But there were other things she
did not know. He used to pay weekly visits to Gay's slaughter yard on
killing day, and reveled in the cruel task of skinning and cutting up
the carcase of the