An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky, opaque, with yellow trails of color dragging in the west:  a sullen stillness in the woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark, inexplicable hush that precedes a storm.  But Lois, coming down the hill-road, singing to herself, and keeping time with her whip-end on the wooden measure, stopped when she grew conscious of it.  It seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening sky:  a something solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come.  The dwarf-pines on the road-side scowled weakly at her through the gray; the very silver minnows in the pools she passed flashed frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches.  There was a vague dread in the sudden silence.  She called to the old donkey, and went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some overhanging peril, unseen.  She saw Margaret coming up the road.  There was a phaeton behind her, and some horsemen:  she jolted the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes’s face in the carriage as she did so.  He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance.  Lois’s vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him.  The face hurt her:  not fair, as Polston called it:  vapid and cruel.  She was dressed in yellow:  the color seemed jeering and mocking to the girl’s sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle.  She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams.  As the phaeton went slowly down, Margaret came nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the air.  Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the fence, as they met her.  Holmes’s cold, wandering eye turned on the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised.  Polston called his eyes hungry:  it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that flashing moment.  The phaeton was gone in an instant, leaving her alone in the muddy road.  One of the men looked back, and then whispered something to the lady with a laugh.  She turned to Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light, confusing eyes on his face, and softening her voice.

“Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love.  Were you, then, so chivalric?  Was it to have been a second romaunt of ’King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’?”

He met her look, and saw the fierce demand through the softness and persiflage.  He gave it no answer, but, turning to her, kindled into the man whom she was so proud to show as her capture,—­a man far off from Stephen Holmes.  Brilliant she called him,—­frank, winning, generous.  She thought she knew him well; held him a slave to her fluttering hand.  Being proud of her slave, she let the hand flutter down now somehow with some flowers it held until it touched his hard fingers, her cheek flushing into rose.  The nerveless, spongy hand,—­what