ted him, and thought him tiresome with
his mild way of getting to know so many things that were no concern of
his. The shrewd guesses which he was making, and the terrible mosaic
that he was piecing together out of such stray fragments as he could
pick up--and he was always picking them up--were hidden from her; and
she understood nothing of the mingled surmise and certainty which made
his interest in her partly retrospective and partly prophetic, as
he fitted in bit by bit that hidden thing in the past or foresaw the
discovery that must come in the future. She only thought him tiresome
and inquisitive, and wished that he would not come so often to see
papa.

It did not take a large amount of that faculty of thought-reading
which Mr. Gryce claimed as so peculiarly his own to see that something
unusual had happened to disturb poor Leam to-day. As she came on, so
wrapped in the sorrow of her thoughts that the world around her was
as a world that is dead--taking no heed of the flowers, the birds,
the sweet spring scents, the glory of the deep-blue sky, while the
flickering shadows of the budding branches played over her like the
shadow of the net in which she had entangled herself--she looked the
very embodiment of despair. Her face, never joyous, was now infinitely
tragic. Her dark eyes were bright with the tears that lay behind them;
her proud mouth had drooped at the corners; she was walking as one
who neither knows where she is nor sees what is before her, as one for
whom there is no sun by day and no stars for the night--lost to all
sense but the one faculty of suffering. She did not even see that some
one stood straight in the path before her, till "Whither and whence?"
asked Mr. Gryce, barring her way.

Then she started and looked up. Evidently she had not heard him. He
repeated the question with a difference. "Ah! good-morning to you,
Miss Dundas. Where are you going? where have you been?" he said in
his soft, low-pitched, lisping voice, with the provincial accent
struggling through its patent affectation.

"I am going to the yew tree and I have been to Steel's Corner," she
answered slowly, in her odd, almost mathematically exact manner of
reply.

"From Steel's Corner! And how is that excellent young man, our deputy
shepherd?" he asked.

"Better," she said with even more than her usual curtness, and she was
never prolix.

"He has been fearfully ill, poor fellow!" said Mr. Gryce, in the
manner of an ejacula