test thought to the
criminality of the proceeding, she had definitely decided, if she could
coerce the girl into falling in with her plans, to marry her to the
highest bidder before worse could happen.

But she was downright afraid of her niece. Afraid of her moral
strength which dominated everything and everybody; ill at ease with the
straightforward way she had of speaking her mind on occasions, and
following up her speech with action. Never an untruth had she known to
pass the girl's lips, not once had she heard her say one belittling
thing about a living soul, and only twice had she seen the sweetness
and gentleness swept with anger.

Cruelty to anything small or weak could transform the girl into a flame
of wrath, and her weakest spot was her overpowering sympathy with
anyone in distress, without any inquiries into the direct cause of the
adversity, which spot caused her to be considerably taken in by many of
those who had discerned it.

An almost abnormal moral strength, allied to great gentleness and pity,
combined to make a character extraordinary in one so young, and which
her aunt summed up and summarily dismissed from her mind in the trite
sentence that "she certainly did not take after her parents."

She was considered slow by the youths, and perplexing and therefore to
be avoided by the girls of her own age, and dull or frightfully
conceited by the men who had fluttered round her almost exotic beauty
until they had come up against the icy barrier of her supreme
indifference.

To those who knew her intimately, such as the fisherfolk and the
farmers, and the tramps with whom she would sit and converse by the
wayside and share her lunch, she was the most lovable, cheery soul in
the world, which, of course, meant the county of Devon.

"Damn standoffish, what!"

Such had been the verdict passed by someone married who hailed from
London town, when Leonie had refused to sit out a dance in a secluded
shady nook.

"Just a bit of heaven!" had said the tramp as he turned the corner in
the lane, leaving Leonie sitting on the milestone pondering upon the
man whose ragged clothes were out of keeping with the shape of his
nails, and the timbre of his voice with his unkempt hair.

But leaving all that aside, and in all conscience it was bad enough,
the biggest worry hung as heavy and as threatening upon the horizon as
does at times the monsoon over the Indian Ocean.

Once upon a time Susan Hetth had committe