looked earnestly at her; but her eyes were averted
towards the tunnel wall.

'What an escape!' he said.

'We were not so very near, I think, were we?' she asked quickly. 'If we
were, I think you were--very good to take my hand.'

They reached the top at last, and the new level and open air seemed to
give her a new mind. 'I don't see the carriage anywhere,' she said, in
the common tones of civilization.

He thought it had gone over the crest of the hill; he would accompany
her till they reached it.

'No--please--I would rather not--I can find it very well.' Before he
could say more she had inclined her head and smiled and was on her way
alone.

The tunnel-cutting appeared a dreary gulf enough now to the young man,
as he stood leaning over the rails above it, beating the herbage with
his stick. For some minutes he could not criticize or weigh her conduct;
the warmth of her presence still encircled him. He recalled her face as
it had looked out at him from under the white silk puffing of her black
hat, and the speaking power of her eyes at the moment of danger. The
breadth of that clear-complexioned forehead--almost concealed by
the masses of brown hair bundled up around it--signified that if her
disposition were oblique and insincere enough for trifling, coquetting,
or in any way making a fool of him, she had the intellect to do it
cruelly well.

But it was ungenerous to ruminate so suspiciously. A girl not an actress
by profession could hardly turn pale artificially as she had done,
though perhaps mere fright meant nothing, and would have arisen in her
just as readily had he been one of the labourers on her estate.

The reflection that such feeling as she had exhibited could have no
tender meaning returned upon him with masterful force when he thought of
her wealth and the social position into which she had drifted. Somerset,
being of a solitary and studious nature, was not quite competent
to estimate precisely the disqualifying effect, if any, of her
nonconformity, her newness of blood, and other things, among the old
county families established round her; but the toughest prejudices, he
thought, were not likely to be long invulnerable to such cheerful beauty
and brightness of intellect as Paula's. When she emerged, as she was
plainly about to do, from the seclusion in which she had been living
since her father's death, she would inevitably win her way among her
neighbours. She would become the local topic. Fo