mily; but do you know, miss, what it is
to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say
what it was like? Have you the least notion how you would feel on being
fooled a second time like that?"

The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something
inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware,
too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some
vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before. These
thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there
are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its
surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or
lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of
our experience.

That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest
into a strange story, and the more if it is true. If we could only learn
it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our
attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in
healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that
excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the
moment they become in any way surprising.

Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest. She
plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to
get a better look at the house; she assured him that Chellaston was the
last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.

He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates's story,
to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.

"I saw the face twice. It was first at Turrifs Station, far enough away
from here; and I saw it again in this house. As sure as I'm alive, I
believe it was a woman."

They stood on the verge of the field where the grass sloped back from
the river. Sophia held the little child's hand in hers. The dusk was
gathering, and still they talked on, she questioning and exclaiming with
animation, he eager to enter the house again, a mutual interest holding
their minds as one.

He began to move again impatiently. He wanted a candle with which to
search the rooms more carefully, and if nothing was found, he said, he
would go to the village and make what inquiries he could; he would leave
no stone unturned.

Sophia would not let him go alone. She was already on perfectly familiar
terms with him. He seemed to her a delightful mixture of