That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true.  If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.

Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest.  She plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to get a better look at the house; she assured him that Chellaston was the last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.

He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates’s story, to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.

“I saw the face twice.  It was first at Turrifs Station, far enough away from here; and I saw it again in this house.  As sure as I’m alive, I believe it was a woman.”

They stood on the verge of the field where the grass sloped back from the river.  Sophia held the little child’s hand in hers.  The dusk was gathering, and still they talked on, she questioning and exclaiming with animation, he eager to enter the house again, a mutual interest holding their minds as one.

He began to move again impatiently.  He wanted a candle with which to search the rooms more carefully, and if nothing was found, he said, he would go to the village and make what inquiries he could; he would leave no stone unturned.

Sophia would not let him go alone.  She was already on perfectly familiar terms with him.  He seemed to her a delightful mixture of the ardent boy and the man who, as she understood it, was roughened by lumberman’s life.  She lifted Dottie on her shoulder and turned homeward.  “I will only be a few minutes getting Harold and some candles; don’t go without us, I beg of you,” she pleaded.

He never thought of offering to carry the child, or call her brother for her; his ideas of gallantry were submerged in the confusion of his thoughts.  He watched her tripping lightly with the child on her shoulder.  He saw her choose a path by the back of the white dairy buildings, and then he heard her clear voice calling, “Harold!  Harold!” All up the yard’s length to windows of house and stable he heard her calling, till at length came the answering shout.  In the silence that followed he remembered, with a feeling of wonder, the shudder of distaste that had come over him when he found that the other creature with whom he had been dealing bore a woman’s form.  He could not endure to think of her in the same moment in which he longed to hear Miss Rexford’s voice again and to see her come back.  In the one case he could not believe that evil was not the foundation of such eccentricity of mystery; in the other he thought nothing, realised nothing, he only longed for Sophia’s return,