Eliza sat still in her rough woodland chamber till the stray sunbeams had left its floor of moss and played only through the high open windows in the elm bough roof.  She had seen the cows milked, and now heard the church bells ring.  She looked intently through the fissures of the spruce shrub walls till at length she saw a light carriage drive away from the college grounds with the clergyman and his brother in it.  She knew now that their house would be left almost empty.  After waiting till the last church-going gig had passed on the road and the bells had stopped, she went into the college grounds by a back way, and on to the front of Trenholme’s house.

As was common in the place, the front door yielded when the handle was turned.  Eliza had no wish to summon the housekeeper.  She stood in the inner hall and listened, that she might hear what rooms had inmates.  From the kitchen came occasional clinking of cups and plates; the housekeeper had evidently not swerved from her regular work.  With ears preternaturally acute, Eliza hearkened to the silence in the other rooms till some slight sound, she could hardly tell of what, led her upstairs to a certain door.  She did not knock; she had no power to stand there waiting for a response; the primitive manners of the log house in which she had lived so long were upon her.  She entered the room abruptly, roughly, as she would have entered the log house door.

In a long chair lay the man she sought.  He was dressed in common ill-fitting clothes; he lay as only the very weak lie, head and limbs visibly resting on the support beneath them.

She crossed her arms and stood there, fierce and defiant.  She was conscious of the dignity of her pose, of her improved appearance and of her fine clothes; the consciousness formed part of her defiance.  But he did not even see her mood, just as, manlike, he did not see her dress.  All that he did see was that here, in actual life before him, was the girl he had lost.  In his weakness he bestirred himself with a cry of fond wondering joy—­“Sissy!”

“Yes, Mr. Bates, I’m here.”

Some power came to him, for he sat erect, awed and reverent before this sudden delight that his eyes were drinking in.  “Are you safe, Sissy?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she replied, scornfully, “I’ve been quite safe ever since I got away from you, Mr. Bates.  I’ve taken care of myself, so I’m quite safe and getting on finely; but I’d get on better if my feet weren’t tied in a sack because of the things you made me do—­you made me do it, you know you did.”  She challenged his self-conviction with fierce intensity.  “It was you made me go off and leave your aunt before you’d got any one else to take care of her; it was you who made me take her money because you’d give me none that was lawfully my own; it was you that made me run away in a way that wouldn’t seem very nice if any one knew, and do things they wouldn’t think very nice, and—­and”