ht be, cruelty there might be, and
shame; but the blood ran too briskly in his veins and he had looked too
often into the girl's candid eyes--reading something there which had not
been there formerly--to fear to find either at her door.

He had taken to coming to the living-room a little before nightfall;
there he would seat himself beside the hearth while she prepared the
evening meal. The glow of the wood-fire, reflected in rows of burnished
pewters, or given back by the night-backed casements, the savour of the
coming meal, the bubbling of the black pot between which and the table
her nimble feet carried her a dozen times in as many minutes, the
pleasant, homely room with its touches of refinement and its winter
comfort, these were excuses enough had he not brought the book which lay
unheeded on his knee.

But in truth he offered her no excuse. With scarce a word an
understanding had grown up between them that not a million words could
have made more clear. Each played the appropriated part. He looked and
she bore the look, and if she blushed the fire was warrant, and if he
stared it was the blind man's hour between day and night, and why should
he not sit idle as well as another? Soon there was not a turn of her
head or a line of her figure that he did not know; not a trick of her
walk, not a pose of her hand as she waited for a pot to boil that he
could not see in the dark; not a gleam from her hair as she stooped to
the blaze, nor a turn of her wrist as she shielded her face that was not
as familiar to him as if he had known her from childhood.

In these hours she let the mask fall. The apathy, which had been the
least natural as it had been the most common garb of her young face, and
which had grown to be the cover and veil of her feelings, dropped from
her. Seated in the shadow, while she moved, now in the glow of the
burning embers, now obscured, he read her mind without disguise--save in
one dark nook--watched unrebuked the eye fall and the lip tremble, or in
rarer moments saw the shy smile dimple the corner of her cheek. Not
seldom she stood before him sad: sad without disguise, her bowed head
and drooping shoulders the proof of gloomy thoughts, that strayed, he
fancied, far from her work or her companion. And sometimes a tear fell
and she wiped it away, making no attempt to hide it; and sometimes she
would shiver and sigh as if in pain or fear.

At these times he longed for Basterga's throat; and the bloo