to think anything could
be gained by that. She is, in a sense, a friend of mine."

"Don't say she is a _friend_ of yours--_don't!_" he said, with almost
disgust in his tone.

They had halted in the lane just outside the yard gate, and now he put
down the pail and turned his back on the still shut gate to speak with
more freedom. As he talked, the brisk air dashed about the boughs of the
spindling lilac hedge, shaking slant sunbeams upon the unpainted gate
and upon the young man and woman in front of it.

Then, but in a way that was graphic because of strong feeling, Alec
Trenholme told the more real part of the story which he had outlined the
night before; told of the melancholy solitude in which Bates had been
left with the helpless old woman in a house that was bewitched in the
eyes of all, so that no servant or labourer would come near it. In talk
that was a loose mosaic of detail and generalisation, he told of the
woman's work to which the proud Scotchman had been reduced in care of
the aunt who in his infancy had cared for him, and how he strove to keep
the house tidy for her because she fretted when she saw housework
ill-done. He explained that Bates would have been reduced to hard
straits for want of the yearly income from his lumber had not he himself
"chanced" to go and help him. He said that Bates had gone through all
this without complaint, without even counting it hard, because of the
grief he counted so much worse--the loss of the girl, and the belief
that she had perished because of his unkindness.

"For he _loved_ her, Miss Rexford. He had never had anyone else to care
for, and he had just centred his whole heart on her. He cared for her as
if she had been his daughter and sister, and--and he cared for her in
another way that was more than all. It was a lonely enough place; no one
could blame a woman for wanting to leave it; but to leave a man to think
her dead when he loved her!"

Sophia was touched by the story and touched nearly also by the heart of
the man who told it, for in such telling the hearts of speaker and
listener beat against one another through finer medium than that which
we call space. But just because she was touched it was characteristic in
her to find a point that she could assail.

"I don't see that a woman is specially beholden to a man because he
loves her against her will."

"Do you mean to say"--fiercely--"that she was not beholden to him
because he taught her everything s