to walking out of
doors, was based on the fact told him by Mrs. Martha and his brother,
that the day before Bates had wilfully walked forth, and after some
hours came back much exhausted. "Where did you go?" Alec had asked him
fiercely, almost suspecting, from his abject looks, that he had seen the
girl. He could, however, learn nothing but that the invalid had walked
"down the road and rested a while and come back." Nothing important had
happened, Alec thought; and yet this conclusion was not true.

That which had happened had been this. John Bates, after lying for a
week trying to devise some cunning plan for seeing Sissy without
compromising her, and having failed in this, rose up in the sudden
energy of a climax of impatience, and, by dint of short stages and many
rests by the roadside, found his way through the town, up the steps of
the hotel, and into its bar-room. No one could hinder him from going
there, thought he, and perchance he might see the lassie.

Years of solitude, his great trouble, and, lastly, the complaint which
rendered him so obviously feeble, had engendered in his heart a shyness
that made it terrible to him to go alone across the hotel verandah,
where men and women were idling. In truth, though he was obviously ill,
the people noticed him much less than he supposed, for strangers often
came there; but egotism is a knife which shyness uses to wound itself
with. When he got into the shaded and comparatively empty bar-room, he
would have felt more at home, had it not been for the disconsolate
belief that there was one at home in that house to whom his presence
would be terribly unwelcome. It was with a nightmare of pain and
desolation on his heart that he laid trembling arms upon the bar, and
began to chat with the landlord.

"I'm on the look-out for a young man and a young woman," said he,
"who'll come and work on my clearing;" and so he opened talk with the
hotel-keeper. He looked often through the door into the big passage, but
Sissy did not pass.

Now Mr. Hutchins did not know of anyone to suit Bates's requirements,
and he did know that the neighbourhood of Chellaston was the most
unlikely to produce such servants, but, having that which was
disappointing to say, he said it by degrees. Bates ordered a glass of
cooling summer drink, and had his pipe filled while they discussed. The
one tasted to him like gall, and the fumes of the other were powerless
to allay his growing trepidation, and ye