ld not have done more for me. It is
only that she seems cold and severe with Dick---- Dear cousin Hubert, I
hope you are not angry with me for saying what I have said about your
sister?"

He was obliged to look at her when she addressed him thus directly. She
was surprised by the expression of pain--bitter humiliating pain--upon
his face. Was it sympathy for her loss, she wondered, or grief for
little Dick's position, or distress at her accusation of Florence that
caused his face to wear that look of positive anguish? She could not
tell.

"Angry?" he said, stretching out his hand and laying it tenderly on her
own, while the pain in his eyes softened into a melancholy as
inscrutable as the pain. "Could I ever be angry with you, Enid? Poor
little lonely motherless child! Heaven knows, if I could protect you
from sorrow or pain henceforth, I would do so at the cost of my life!"

He withdrew his hand and walked away somewhat abruptly, without once
looking round. Enid remained where he had left her, pale with emotion,
overpowered by a feeling that was neither joy nor fear, but which
partook of both.

CHAPTER XII.

Hubert felt that he had been betrayed into displaying an excess of
emotion very foreign to the character of the cynic and the worldling
which he was desirous to assume. Circumstances, he told himself, had
been too strong for him. Even at the price of not making a study for a
novel of poor little Enid's personality--and how could he ever seriously
have thought of such a thing?--he must not risk close intercourse with
her. Her innocent allusions to the past, her guileless confidence in
himself, wrung his heart with shame and dismay. When he left her, he
wandered away to the other side of the sheet of water in front of the
house, until he came to a small fir plantation on the side of the hill
which rose from the water's edge. He had not been there for years, and
yet he had not forgotten a single turning in the narrow pathway that ran
deviously between the fir-tree shrubs; the memory of the little open
glade in the centre of the tiny wood had never lost its terrible
distinctness. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see every
detail of the scene, every branch of the fir-trees against the darkening
sky, every rise or depression in the mossy ground. The very scent of the
woods gave him a sickening sensation; the crunch of a broken twig made
him turn pale with the horror of a quick remembrance. For i