lation that Elfride was startled to find that her
harmonies had fired a small Troy, in the shape of Stephen's heart. She
said quickly:

'But you can't live here always.'

'Oh no.' And he drew himself in with the sensitiveness of a snail.

Elfride's emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least of
woman's lesser infirmities--love of admiration--caused an inflammable
disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her own, to appear as
meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem culpable in her.

Chapter IV

'Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap.'

For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after
dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first,
two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter V. Towards
the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared the sea, gray and small.
On the brow of one hill, of rather greater altitude than its neighbour,
stood the church which was to be the scene of his operations. The lonely
edifice was black and bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip
of the hill. It had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement
nor pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance with
the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round the church ran
a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was the graveyard;
not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of landscape with its due
variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere profile against the sky, serrated
with the outlines of graves and a very few memorial stones. Not a tree
could exist up there: nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.

Five minutes after this casual survey was made his bedroom was empty,
and its occupant had vanished quietly from the house.

At the end of two hours he was again in the room, looking warm and
glowing. He now pursued the artistic details of dressing, which on
his first rising had been entirely omitted. And a very blooming boy he
looked, after that mysterious morning scamper. His mouth was a triumph
of its class. It was the cleanly-cut, piquantly pursed-up mouth of
William Pitt, as represented in the well or little known bust by
Nollekens--a mouth which is in itself a young man's fortune, if properly
exercised. His round chin, where its upper part turned inward, still
continued its perfect and full curve, seeming to press in to a point the
bottom of his nether lip at their place of junction.