Instead of going home when she left Steel’s Corner, Leam turned up into the wood, making for the old hiding-place where she and Alick had so often sat in the first days of her desolation and when he had been her sole comforter.  She was very sorrowful, and oppressed with doubts and self-reproaches.  As she climbed the steep wood-path, her eyes fixed on the ground, her empty basket in her hand, and her heart as void of hope or joy as was this of flowers, she thought over the last hour as she might have thought over a death.  How sorry she was that Alick had said those words! how grieved that he loved her like this, when she did not love him, when she could never have loved him if even she had not been a Spaniard and her mother’s daughter!

But she did not wish that he was different from what he was, so that she might have been able to return his love.  Leam had none of that shifting uncertainty, that want of a central determination, which makes so many women transact their lives by an If.  She knew what she did not feel, and she did not care to regret the impossible, to tamper with the indefinite.  She knew that she neither loved Alick nor, wished to love him.  Whether she had unwittingly deceived him in the first place, and in the second ought to sacrifice herself for him, unloving, was each a question on which she pondered full of those doubts and self-reproaches that so grievously beset her.

As she was wandering drearily onward Mr. Gryce saw her from a side path.  He struck off to meet her, smiling, for he had taken a strong affection for this strange and beautiful young creature, which he justified to himself as interest in her history.

This acute, suspicious and inquisitive old heathen had some queer notions packed away in his wallet of biological speculations—­notions which supplemented the fruits of his natural gifts, and which he always managed to harmonize with what he already knew by more commonplace means.  He had been long in the East, whence he had brought a cargo of half-scientific, half-superstitious fancies—­belief in astrology, mesmerism, spiritualism, and cheiromancy the most prominent.  He could cast a horoscope, summon departed spirits, heal the sick and read the reticent by mesmeric force, and explain the past as well as prophesy the future by the lines in the hand.

So at least he said; and people were bound to believe that he believed in himself when he said so.  He had once looked at Leam’s hand, and had seen something there which, translated by his rules, had helped him on the road that he had already opened for himself by private inquiry based on the likelihood of things.  Crime, love, sorrow—­it was no ordinary history that was printed in the lines of her feverish little palm, as it was no ordinary character that looked out from her intense pathetic face.  There was something almost as interesting here as a meditation on the mystic Nirvana or a discourse on that persistent residuum of all myths—­Maya, delusion.