“Yes—­indeed a thing of good augury”—­she affirmed.

Yet in speaking her lips shook.  For, in truth, poor child, she was hard-pressed.  This intimate intercourse, alike in its simple directness and its novelty, began to wear on her to the point of physical distress.  She felt tremulous and faint.  Not that Faircloth jarred upon or was distasteful to her.  Far from that.  His youth and health, the unspoiled vigour and force of him, captivated her imagination.  Even the dash of roughness, the lapses from conventional forms of speech and manner she now and again observed in him, caught her fancy, heightening his attraction for her.  Nor was she any longer tormented by a sense of isolation.  For, as she recognized, he stole nothing away which heretofore belonged to her.  Rather did he add his own by no means inconsiderable self to the sum of her possessions.—­And in that last fact she probably touched the real crux, the real strain, of the present, to her disintegrating, situation.  For in him, and in his relation to her, a wonderful and very precious gift was bestowed upon her, namely another human life to love and live for.—­Bestowed on her, moreover, without asking or choice of her own, arbitrarily, through the claim of his and her common ancestry and the profound moral and spiritual obligations, the mysterious affinities, which a common ancestry creates.

Had she possessed this gift from childhood, had it taken its natural place in her experience through the linked and orderly progress of the years, it would have been wholly welcome, wholly profitable and sweet.  But it was sprung upon her from the outside, quite astoundingly ready-made.  It bore down on her, and at a double, foot, horse, and siege guns complete.  Small discredit to her if she staggered under its onset, trembled and turned faint!  For as she now perceived, it was exactly this relation of brother and sister of which she had some prescience, some dim intuition, from her first sight of Faircloth as he stood among the skeleton lobster-pots on board Timothy Proud’s old boat.  It was this call of a common blood which begot in her unreasoning panic, which she had run from and so wildly tried to escape.  And yet it remained a gift of great price, a crown of gold; but oh! so very heavy—­just at this moment anyhow—­for her poor proud young head.

Lifting her hand off Faircloth’s, she made a motion to rise.  Change of attitude and place might bring her relief, serve to steady her nerves and restore her endangered composure!  Brooding over the whole singular matter in the peace and security of her room upstairs, her course had appeared a comparatively easy one, granted reasonable courage and address.  But the young man’s bodily presence, as now close beside her, exercised an emotional influence quite unforeseen and unreckoned with.  Under it her will wavered.  She ceased to see her way clearly, to be sure of herself.  She grew timid, bewildered, unready both of purpose and of speech.