“Del is too pretty to be here alone so late,” thought Asenath, smiling tenderly.  Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she rather loved the girl.  She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take care of herself.

Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one—­it was too dark to see distinctly—­stood beside her, his eyes upon her face.  Asenath could hear nothing, but she needed to hear nothing to know how the young fellow’s eyes drank in the coquettish picture.  Besides, it was an old story.  Del counted her rejected lovers by the score.

“It’s no wonder,” she thought in her honest way, standing still to watch them with a sense of puzzled pleasure much like that with which she watched the print-windows,—­“it’s no wonder they love her.  I’d love her if I was a man:  so pretty! so pretty!  She’s just good for nothing, Del is;—­would let the kitchen fire go out, and wouldn’t mend the baby’s aprons; but I’d love her all the same; marry her, probably, and be sorry all my life.”

Pretty Del!  Poor Del!  Asenath wondered whether she wished that she were like her; she could not quite make out; it would be pleasant to sit on a log and look like that; it would be more pleasant to be watched as Del was watched just now; it struck her suddenly that Dick had never looked like this at her.

The hum of their voices ceased while she stood there with her eyes upon them; Del turned her head away with a sudden movement, and the young man left her, apparently without bow or farewell, sprang up the bank at a bound, and crushed the undergrowth with quick, uneasy strides.

Asenath, with some vague idea that it would not be honorable to see his face,—­poor fellow!—­shrank back into the aspens and the shadow.

He towered tall in the twilight as he passed her, and a dull, umber gleam, the last of the sunset, struck him from the west.

Struck it out into her sight,—­the haggard struggling face,—­Richard Cross’s face.

Of course you knew it from the beginning, but remember that the girl did not.  She might have known it, perhaps, but she had not.

Asenath stood up, sat down again.

She had a distinct consciousness, for the moment, of seeing herself crouched down there under the aspens and the shadow, a humpbacked white creature, with distorted face and wide eyes.  She remembered a picture she had somewhere seen of a little chattering goblin in a graveyard, and was struck with the resemblance.  Distinctly, too, she heard herself saying, with a laugh, she thought, “I might have known it; I might have known.”

Then the blood came through her heart with a hot rush, and she saw Del on the log, smoothing the red feather of her hat.  She heard a man’s step, too, that rang over the bridge, passed the toll-house, grew faint, grew fainter, died in the sand by the Everett Mill.