e weapon if only the bearer of it had been within measurable
distance.

Rachel did not read her niece, for the simple reason that she was too
resolved on reading what she supposed herself to have written to be able
to trace the characters of mere nature. But she partly read the young
man's triumph, and adjudged it as a piece of insolence, determining that
he should be punished for it richly, as he deserved. She had exposed
the character of the Golds to her niece, and had told her that they were
wicked and bad and shameless--male jilts, whose one delight it was to
break feminine hearts. Ruth would certainly believe what she had
been told on such unimpeachable authority, and would never dream
of permitting herself to be duped by a man of whom she knew so much
beforehand. Any airs of triumph the young man might display were
therefore ridiculous and insolent, deserving both of chastisement and
contempt.

Ruth's household occupations took her away a second time, and if she
chose to fill a mere two or three minutes by writing a note to a young
man who sat within six yards of her, nobody suspected her of being so
engaged. When she came back to her visitors, Reuben would fain have
made opportunity to be near her, but Rachel was unwinking in her
watchfulness, and he was compelled to surrender his design. The bells
began to ring for evening church, and Ruth and the womenfolk went
up-stairs to make ready for out-of-doors. The quartette party sat
downstairs with open windows, each of the three seniors pulling gravely
at a long church-warden, and the junior pretending to look at an
old-fashioned book of beauty, in which a number of impossible ladies
simpered on the observer from bowers of painted foliage.

Sitting near the window with his back to the garden, and deeply absorbed
in his own fancies, he found himself on a sudden impelled to turn his
head, not because of any sound that reached him, but because of some
curious intuition of Ruth's neighborhood to him. She was walking towards
him at that moment, her footsteps falling soundlessly on the greensward,
her face blushing and her eyes downcast. As she passed him and entered
the house she raised her eyes for a moment, and Reuben read in them a
sweet, enigmatical intelligence, and a charmed shyness so delicious that
he thrilled at it from head to feet.

He longed, as any lover may imagine of him, to exchange a word with
her. He was certain, but he desired to be more than certai