It was to follow up the line thus opened to him that he had attached himself with so much zeal to his landlord, unsympathetic as such a man as Sebastian Dundas must needs be to a metaphysical and superstitious student of humanity, a born detective, shrewd, inquisitive and suspicious.  But he attached himself for the sake of Leam and her future, saying often to himself, “By and by.  She will come to me by and by, when I can be useful to her.”

Meanwhile, Leam received his cares with the characteristic indifference of youth for the attentions of age.  She was not at the back of the motives which prompted him, and thought him tiresome with his mild way of getting to know so many things that were no concern of his.  The shrewd guesses which he was making, and the terrible mosaic that he was piecing together out of such stray fragments as he could pick up—­and he was always picking them up—­were hidden from her; and she understood nothing of the mingled surmise and certainty which made his interest in her partly retrospective and partly prophetic, as he fitted in bit by bit that hidden thing in the past or foresaw the discovery that must come in the future.  She only thought him tiresome and inquisitive, and wished that he would not come so often to see papa.

It did not take a large amount of that faculty of thought-reading which Mr. Gryce claimed as so peculiarly his own to see that something unusual had happened to disturb poor Leam to-day.  As she came on, so wrapped in the sorrow of her thoughts that the world around her was as a world that is dead—­taking no heed of the flowers, the birds, the sweet spring scents, the glory of the deep-blue sky, while the flickering shadows of the budding branches played over her like the shadow of the net in which she had entangled herself—­she looked the very embodiment of despair.  Her face, never joyous, was now infinitely tragic.  Her dark eyes were bright with the tears that lay behind them; her proud mouth had drooped at the corners; she was walking as one who neither knows where she is nor sees what is before her, as one for whom there is no sun by day and no stars for the night—­lost to all sense but the one faculty of suffering.  She did not even see that some one stood straight in the path before her, till “Whither and whence?” asked Mr. Gryce, barring her way.

Then she started and looked up.  Evidently she had not heard him.  He repeated the question with a difference.  “Ah! good-morning to you, Miss Dundas.  Where are you going? where have you been?” he said in his soft, low-pitched, lisping voice, with the provincial accent struggling through its patent affectation.

“I am going to the yew tree and I have been to Steel’s Corner,” she answered slowly, in her odd, almost mathematically exact manner of reply.

“From Steel’s Corner!  And how is that excellent young man, our deputy shepherd?” he asked.

“Better,” she said with even more than her usual curtness, and she was never prolix.