first allusion to the topic which had
previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she
named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they
had last met, the subject burned within him: her being in actual fact a
stranger had not, then, been an obstacle to his confidences. Now that he
was master at Westmore it was plain that another tone became him--that
his situation necessitated a greater reserve; but her enquiry did not
imply the least wish to overstep this restriction: it merely showed her
remembrance of his frankly-avowed interest in the operatives. Justine
was struck by the fact that so natural an allusion should put him on the
defensive. She did not for a moment believe that he had lost his
interest in the mills; and that his point of view should have shifted
with the fact of ownership she rejected as an equally superficial
reading of his character. The man with whom she had talked at Dillon's
bedside was one in whom the ruling purposes had already shaped
themselves, and to whom life, in whatever form it came, must henceforth
take their mould. As she reached this point in her analysis, it occurred
to her that his shrinking from the subject might well imply not
indifference, but a deeper preoccupation: a preoccupation for some
reason suppressed and almost disavowed, yet sustaining the more
intensely its painful hidden life. From this inference it was but a leap
of thought to the next--that the cause of the change must be sought
outside of himself, in some external influence strong enough to modify
the innate lines of his character. And where could such an influence be
more obviously sought than in the marriage which had transformed the
assistant manager of the Westmore Mills not, indeed, into their
owner--that would rather have tended to simplify the problem--but into
the husband of Mrs. Westmore? After all, the mills were Bessy's--and for
a farther understanding of the case it remained to find out what manner
of person Bessy had become.

Justine's first impression, as her friend's charming arms received
her--with an eagerness of welcome not lost on the suspended judgment of
feminine Hanaford--the immediate impression was of a gain of emphasis,
of individuality, as though the fluid creature she remembered had belied
her prediction, and run at last into a definite mould. Yes--Bessy had
acquired an outline: a graceful one, as became her early promise, though
with, perhaps, a l