d away from the conjectures roused by Liff Hyatt's presence.
Speculations concerning the past could not hold her long when the
present was so rich, the future so rosy, and when Lucius Harney,
a stone's throw away, was bending over his sketch-book, frowning,
calculating, measuring, and then throwing his head back with the sudden
smile that had shed its brightness over everything.

She scrambled to her feet, but as she did so she saw him coming up the
pasture and dropped down on the grass to wait. When he was drawing and
measuring one of "his houses," as she called them, she often strayed
away by herself into the woods or up the hillside. It was partly from
shyness that she did so: from a sense of inadequacy that came to her
most painfully when her companion, absorbed in his job, forgot her
ignorance and her inability to follow his least allusion, and plunged
into a monologue on art and life. To avoid the awkwardness of listening
with a blank face, and also to escape the surprised stare of the
inhabitants of the houses before which he would abruptly pull up their
horse and open his sketch-book, she slipped away to some spot from
which, without being seen, she could watch him at work, or at least look
down on the house he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first,
to have it known to North Dormer and the neighborhood that she was
driving Miss Hatchard's cousin about the country in the buggy he had
hired of lawyer Royall. She had always kept to herself, contemptuously
aloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether her
fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she
was reserving herself for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she envied
the other girls their sentimental preoccupations, their long hours of
inarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingered
in the village; but when she pictured herself curling her hair or
putting a new ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or one of the Sollas boys
the fever dropped and she relapsed into indifference.

Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and reluctances. She had
learned what she was worth when Lucius Harney, looking at her for the
first time, had lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening on
the edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had been born in
her: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils the sacred treasure of her
happiness. She was not sorry to have the neighbors suspect her of "going
with