Now Sophia felt that what Eliza had said was only the fact—­that it was very sad that Mr. Bates should go ill and alone to his lonely home, but that it could not be helped.  To whatever degree of repentance and new resolution Eliza might be brought, Sophia saw no way whatever of materially helping Bates; but she urged the girl to go and visit him, and say such kind and penitent things as might be in her power to say, before he set forth on his melancholy journey.

“No,” said Eliza, “I won’t go”; and this was all that could be obtained from her.

The visit was at an end.  Sophia felt that it had been futile, and she did not overlook the rebuff to herself.  With this personal affront rankling, and indignation that Eliza should still feel so resentful after all that had been urged on behalf of Bates, she made her way into the street.

She was feeling that life was a weary thing when she chanced, near the end of the village, to look back, and saw Alec Trenholme some way behind, but coming in the same direction.  Having her report to give, she waited and brought him to her side.

Sophia told all that had just passed, speaking with a restful feeling of confidence in him.  She had never felt just this confidence in a man before; it sprang up from somewhere, she knew not where; probably from the union of her sense of failure and his strength.  She even told him the analogy she had drawn between Eliza’s conduct and the mistake of her own life, alluding only to what all her little public knew of her deeds; but it seemed to him that she was telling what was sacred to her self-knowledge.  He glanced at her often, and drank in all the pleasure of her beauty.  He even noticed the simplicity of the cotton gown and leather belt, and the hat that was trimmed only with dried everlasting flowers, such as grew in every field.  As she talked his cane struck sometimes a sharp passionate blow among plumes of golden-rod that grew by their path, and snapped many a one.

The roadside grass was ragged.  The wild plum shrubs by the fences were bronzed by September.  In the fields the stubble was yellow and brown.  The scattered white houses were all agleam in the clear, cool sunshine.

As he listened, Alec Trenholme’s feeling was not now wrought upon at all by what he was hearing of the girl who had stumbled in and out of his life in ghostly fashion.  Her masquerade, with all its consequences, had brought him within near touch of another woman, whose personality at this hour overshadowed his mind to the exclusion of every other interest.  He was capable only of thinking that Sophia was treating him as a well-known friend.  The compunction suppressed within him culminated when, at her father’s gate, Miss Rexford held out her hand for the good-bye grasp of his.  The idea that he was playing a false part became intolerable.  Impulsively he showed reluctance to take the hand.

“Miss Rexford, I—­I’m afraid you think—­”