As for school, Elsie went or stayed away as she liked.  Sometimes, when they thought she was at her desk in the great school-room, she would be on The Mountain,—­alone always.  Dick wanted to go with her, but she would never let him.  Once, when she had followed the zigzag path a little way up, she looked back and caught a glimpse of him following her.  She turned and passed him without a word, but giving him a look which seemed to make the scars on his wrist tingle, went to her room, where she locked herself up, and did not come out again till evening,—­old Sophy having brought her food, and set it down, not speaking, but looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out his master’s will in his face.  The evening was clear and the moon shining.  As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees and steal along the narrow path that led upward.  Elsie’s pillow was impressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,—­for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel.  The next morning she avoided him and went off early to school.  It was the same morning that the young master found the flower between the leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her cousin for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought him.  She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in certain poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder scholars.  This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways when her eye was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice, to watch for any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he had a kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him, and, though she interested him, he did not wish to study her heart from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon him.  She looked as if she might hate, but could not love.  She hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves.  A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face produced upon him.  The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears.  The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation.  There was in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love.  And yet the master could not help feeling that some instinct was working in