thought clung to her as she sauntered slowly down the
garden--alleys, her lips kept moving in a childish fashion of hers. "A
home at last, at last!"--that was what she said.

Paul Blecker, too, waiting back yonder among the trees, saw McKinstry
and his companion, and read the same story that Grey did, but in a
different fashion. "The girl loves him." There were possibilities,
however, in that woman's curious traits, that Blecker, being a physician
and a little of a soul-fancier, saw: nothing in McKinstry's formal,
orthodox nature ran parallel with them; therefore he never would know
them. As they passed Blecker's outlook through the trees, his half-shut
eye ran over her,--the despondent step, the lithe, nervous limbs, the
manner in which she clung for protection to his horny hand. "Poor
child!" the Doctor thought. There was something more, in the girl's
face, that, people called gentle and shy: a weak, uncertain chin; thin
lips, never still an instant, opening and shutting like a starving
animal's; gray eyes, dead, opaque, such as Blecker had noted in the
spiritual mediums in New England.

"I'm glad it is McKinstry she loves, and not I," he said.

He turned, and forgot her, watching Grey coming nearer to him. The
garden sloped down to the borders of the creek, and she stood on its
edge now, looking at the uneasy crusting of the black water and the
pearly glint of moonlight. Thinking of Lizzy, and the strong love that
held her; feeling a little lonely, maybe, and quiet, she did not know
why; trying to wrench her thoughts back to the house, and the clothes,
and the spareribs. Why! he could read her thoughts on her face as if
it were a baby's! A homely, silly girl they called her. He thanked God
nobody had found her out before him. Look at the dewy freshness of her
skin! how pure she was! how the world would knock her about, if he did
not keep his hold on her! But he would do that; to-night he meant to lay
his hand upon her life, and never take it off, absorb it in his own. She
moved forward into the clear light: that was right. There was a broken
boll of a beech--tree covered with lichen: she should sit on that,
presently, her face in open light, he in the shadow, while he told
her. "Watching her with hot breath where she stood, then going down to
her:--

"Is Grey waiting to bid her friend good-bye?"

She put her hand in his,--her very lips trembling with the sudden heat,
her untrained eyes wandering restlessly.