is hands on his knees.

"But you have told me nothing," she replied, striving to remain
mistress of herself and to hide her apprehension.

"Do you call that nothing? You have the approximate cause--_causa
causans_. Was it Cupid? No, for like Bacon, your sex's 'fantastical'
charms move me not."

This sally put him in better temper with himself. She was helpless,
and he experienced a churlish satisfaction in her condition.

"What was it, then? Cupidity. Do you know what poverty is like in this
barren region?" he cried harshly. "The weapons of education only
unfit you for the plow. You stint, pinch, live on nothing!" He rubbed
his dry hands together. "It was crumbs and scraps under the
parsimonious regime; but now the prodigal has come into his own and
believes in honest wages and a merry life."

Wonderingly she listened, the scene like a grotesque dream, with the
ever-moving coach, the lonely road, the dark woods, and--so near, she
could almost place her hand upon him--this man, muttering and
mumbling. He had offered her the key of the mystery, but she had
failed to use it. His ambiguous, loose talk, only perplexed and
alarmed her; the explanation was none at all.

As he watched her out of the corner of his eye, weighing doubt and
uncertainty, new ideas assailed him. After all she had spirit,
courage! Moreover, she was an actress, and the patroon was madly in
love with her.

"If we were only leagued together, how we could strip him!" he
thought.

His head dropped contemplatively to his breast, and for a long
interval he remained silent, abstracted, while the old springless
coach, with many a jolt and jar, covered mile after mile; up the
hills, crowned with bush and timber; across the table land; over the
plank bridges spanning the brooks and rivulets. More reconciled to
his part and her presence, his lips once or twice parted as if he
were about to speak, but closed again. He even smiled, showing his
amber-hued teeth, nodding his head in a friendly fashion, as to
say: "It'll come out all right, Madam; all right for both of us!"
Which, indeed, was his thought. She believed him unsettled, bereft
of reason, and, although, he was manifestly growing less hostile,
his surveillance became almost unbearable. At every moment she felt
him regarding her like a lynx, and endeavored therefore to keep
perfectly still. What would her strange warder do next? It was not an
alarming act, however. He consulted a massive watch, re