silence is always
preferable to noise, and there is a great difference in the marks left
by different casualties. Very likely nothing would come of all this
espionage; but, at any rate, the first thing to be done with a man you
want to have in your power is to learn his habits.

Since the tea-party at the Widow Rowens's, Elsie had been more fitful
and moody than ever. Dick understood all this well enough, you know. It
was the working of her jealousy against that young school-girl to whom
the master had devoted himself for the sake of piquing the heiress of
the Dudley mansion. Was it possible, in any way, to exasperate her
irritable nature against him, and in this way to render her more
accessible to his own advances? It was difficult to influence her at
all. She endured his company without seeming to enjoy it. She watched
him with that strange look of hers, sometimes as if she were on her
guard against him, sometimes as if she would like to strike at him as in
that fit of childish passion. She ordered him about with a haughty
indifference which reminded him of his own way with the dark-eyed women
whom he had known so well of old. All this added a secret pleasure to
the other motives he had for worrying her with jealous suspicions. He
knew she brooded silently on any grief that poisoned her comfort,--that
she fed on it, as it were, until it ran with every drop of blood in her
veins,--and that, except in some paroxysm of rage, of which he himself
was not likely the second time to be the object, or in some deadly
vengeance wrought secretly, against which he would keep a sharp
look-out, so far as he was concerned, she had no outlet for her
dangerous, smouldering passions.

Beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy
inner life either in words or song! So long as a woman can talk, there
is nothing she cannot bear. If she cannot have a companion to listen to
her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental,--then,
if she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood
in her, and you have done her a wrong,--double-bolt the door which she
may enter on noiseless slipper at midnight,--look twice before you taste
of any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened!

But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the
coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in
the language, and let her blister her lips with them until