ng him a look
which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went to her room,
where she locked herself up, and did not come out again till evening,
Old Sophy having brought her food, and set it down, not speaking, but
looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel
out his master's will in his face. The evening was clear and the
moon shining. As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the
mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees
and steal along the narrow path which led upward. Elsie's pillow was
unpressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,--for
Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel. The next morning she avoided
him and went off early to school. It was the same morning that the young
master found the flower between the leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her cousin
for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought him.
She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in certain
poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder scholars.
This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways when her eye
was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice, to watch for
any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he had a
kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him, and, though she
interested him, he did not wish to study her heart from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon
him. She looked as if she might hate, but could not love. She hardly
smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural
power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so
many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. A
person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or
mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source
of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face
produced upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre
of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which
shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it
wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was
in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the
blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature
had meant her to be