s thoughts were with Louise. He was apprehensive of what she might do
next.

As if in answer to his fear, she crossed the room.

"Ask her to take her hands down. I want to see her face."

Maurice bent over Ephie, and touched her shoulder.

"Ephie, dear, do you hear? Look up, like a good girl, and speak to Miss
Dufrayer."

But Ephie shook off his hand.

Over her bowed head, their eyes met; and the look Louise gave the young
man was cold and questioning. He shrugged his shoulders: he could do
nothing; and retreating behind the writing-table, he left the two girls
to themselves.

"Stand up, please," said Louise in an unfriendly voice; and as Ephie
did not obey, she made a movement to take her by the wrists.

"No, no!--don't touch me," cried Ephie, and rose in spite of herself.
"What right have you to speak to me like this?"

She could say no more, for, with a quick, unforeseen movement, Louise
took the young girl's face in both hands, and turned it up. And after
her first instinctive effort to draw back, Ephie kept still, like a
fascinated rabbit, her eyes fixed on the dark face that looked down at
her.

Seconds passed into minutes; and the minutes seemed hours. Maurice
watched, on the alert to intervene, if necessary.

At the entrance of her visitors, Louise had been unable to see
distinctly, so stupefied was she by the thought that the person on whom
her thoughts had run, with a kind of madness, for more than forty-eight
hours, was actually in the room beside her--it was just as though a
nightmare phantom had taken bodily form. And then, too, though she had
spent each of these hours in picturing to herself what this girl would
be like, the reality was so opposed to her imagining that, at first,
she could not reconcile the differences.

Now she forced herself to see every line of the face. Nothing escaped
her. She saw how loosened tendrils of hair on neck and forehead became
little curls; saw the finely marked brows, and the dark blue veins at
the temples; the pink and white colouring of the cheeks; the small
nose, modelled as if in wax; the fascinating baby mouth, with its short
upper-lip. Like most dark, sallow women, whose own brief freshness is
past, the elder girl passionately admired such may-blossom beauty, as
something belonging to a different race from herself. And this was not
all: as she continued to look into Ephie's face, she ceased to be
herself; she became the man whose tastes she knew better