lock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the
rough freshness of the breeze.

The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple,
flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time. From her
small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel,
to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace
of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an
expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form,
a look of strength--not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight,
but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity--seemed to mark her out as
something different from the herd.

Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but
he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an
adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the
lonely moor.

Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the
rest--black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat,
which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky;
and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound
stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that
swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that
moment ready to be inflamed. All things depend on times and moods, and
Edgar's mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable
for the reception of new impressions.

For, of course, it was Leam--Leam, who, since her return from school,
alone and without companionship, was feverish often, and often
impelled to escape into the open country from something that oppressed
her down in the valley too painfully to be borne. She had never been
a confidential nor an expansive schoolfellow; not even an affectionate
one as girls count affection, seeing that she neither kissed nor
cried, nor quarreled nor made up--neither stood as a model of
fidelity nor changed her girl-lovers in anticipation of future
inconstancies--writing a love-letter to Ada to-day and a copy of
verses to Ethel to-morrow--but had kept with all the same quiet
gravity and gentle reticence which seemed to watch rather than share,
and to be more careful not to offend than solicitous to win.

All the same, she missed her former comrades now that she had lost
them; but most of all she missed the wholesome occupation and mental
employment of her studies. Left as she was to herself,