since she thought of it. "Yes," she continued, stroking it, "it looks
very nicely, doesn't it?"

Sophia assented heartily. She liked the girl's choice of clothes; they
seemed to remove her from, and set her far above, the commoner people
who frequented the hotel.

"You're very tired, Miss Sophia, I can see; and it's no wonder after
last night. It's no fun staying to-night, for we all feel dull about
what's happened; I'll go now."

Eliza went quietly down the lane again, in shadow of the lilac hedge,
and let herself out of the wooden gate; but she did not return to the
village. She looked down the road the other way, measuring with her eyes
the distance to the roof of Trenholme's house. She walked in that
direction, and when she came to Captain Rexford's pasture field, she got
through the bars and crossed it to a small wood that lay behind. Long
golden strips of light lay athwart the grass between elongated shades
cast by cows and bushes. The sabbath quiet was everywhere. All the cows
in the pasture came towards her, for it was milking time, and any one
who came suggested to them the luxury of that process. Some followed her
in slow and dubious fashion; some stopped before her on the path. Eliza
did not even look at them, and when she went in among the young fir
trees they left her alone.

It was not a thick wood; the evening sun shone freely between the clumps
of young spruce. In an open glade an elm tree stood, stretching out
branches sensitive to each breath of air, golden in the slant sunlight
above the low dark firs. The roots of this tree were raised and dry.
Eliza sat down on them. She could see between the young trees out to the
side of the college houses and their exit to the road. She could see the
road too: it was this she watched.

CHAPTER III.

Eliza sat still in her rough woodland chamber till the stray sunbeams
had left its floor of moss and played only through the high open windows
in the elm bough roof. She had seen the cows milked, and now heard the
church bells ring. She looked intently through the fissures of the
spruce shrub walls till at length she saw a light carriage drive away
from the college grounds with the clergyman and his brother in it. She
knew now that their house would be left almost empty. After waiting till
the last church-going gig had passed on the road and the bells had
stopped, she went into the college grounds by a back way, and on to the
front of Trenholme's house