With a twingeing hope that it would not be so, she watched the silver birch branch hesitate, yield to the under-ebb, and lie at last helpless on the black stagnancy, which continued to vibrate with an air of malice.  Soon its pretty leaves were waterlogged, and it sank down to bed with the grassy rottenness beside the whitish grasses.  It had had no chance, any more than she herself had when Mr. Philip contrived that although she should run away from him all day, there would come a time when they stood face to face in the little room where no one came, and stared and drawled until she said the silly bairn-like thing that gave him the chance to make a fool of her.  It was all right to be here on the Pentlands enjoying herself, but on Monday she would have to go back and work under Mr. Philip.  She could not go on like this.  She would have to kill herself.  She would jump over the Dean Bridge.  Mother would just have to go and live with Aunt Bessie at Bournemouth.

Yaverland spoke behind her, indolently, because he felt he had all the rest of his life to be happy with her.  “Where’s this Rachael Wing you talk about?  Aren’t you still pals?”

Ellen swallowed her unshed tears. “’Deed, yes,” she said, “but she’s gone to London to be an actress.  I wish I knew how she was getting on.  She’s never written since the first month.”

“Probably she’s having hard luck.”

“Not Rachael.  She’s not like me.  I always was a poor creature beside her.  Anybody could see that Rachael had a wonderful life before her.  She’s not a bit like me.”

“But that’s just what you look like.”

“Havers!” she said dully.  “And me so pairfectly miserable!” As soon as the words were out of her mouth she was frozen with horror.  In the presence of one who was both a man and English she had admitted the disgraceful fact that she was not an imperial creature insolent with success and well pleased with the earth her footstool.  She scrambled to her feet and ran coltishly past him and over the bridge, hiding her face and calling gaily, “Come on!  I want to get up on the hills!” And he followed slowly, thinking pretty things about her.

When he drew abreast of her she had pulled off her tam-o’-shanter and taken out her hairpins, and her hair was blowing sideways across her breast and back.  “It’s good to feel the wind through one’s hair,” she said.  “I wish I had short hair like a man’s.”

“Why don’t you cut yours off then?”

“I somehow feel it would be a shame when I have such a deal of it,” she answered innocently, and fell to chattering of the Spanish military nun that de Quincey wrote about.  She had passed herself off as a man all right.  Did he think a girl could go the length of that anywhere nowadays?  No?  Surely there was somewhere?  Oh, she was a child, a little child, and it was not fair to talk to her of love for a little while yet.  It might be dangerous, for he had heard that sometimes, when a girl was sought