“Anitra!”

She shrunk, not at the word but at his movement, which undoubtedly was abrupt; but immediately recovered herself and, meeting him half-way, cried out in the unnaturally loud tones of the very deaf: 

“They don’t bring my sister back.  She is drowned, drowned.  But you still have Anitra,” she exclaimed in child-like triumph.  “Anitra will be good to you.  Don’t forsake the poor girl.  She will go where you go and be very obedient and not get angry ever again.”

He felt his hair rise.  Something in her look, something in her manner of making evident the indefinable barrier between them even while expressing her desire to accompany him, made such a disturbance in his brain that for the moment he no longer knew himself, nor her, nor the condition of things about him.  If she saw the effect she produced, she gave no evidence of it.  She had begun to smile and her smile transformed her.  The wild look which was never long out of her eyes softened into a milder gleam, and dimples he had been accustomed to see around lips he had kissed and called the sweetest in the world flashed for a moment in the face before him with a story of love he dared not read, yet found it impossible to forget or see unmoved.

“What trial is this into which my unhappy fate has plunged me!” thought he.  “Can reason stand it?  Can I see this woman daily, hourly, and not go mad between my doubts and my love?”

His face had turned so stern that even she noticed it, and in a trice the offending dimples disappeared.

“You are angry,” she pouted.  “You don’t want Anitra.  Nod if it is so, nod and I will go away.”

He did not nod; he could not.  She seemed to gather courage at this, and though she did not smile again, she gave him a happy look as she said: 

“I have no home now, nor any friend since sister has gone.  I don’t want any if I can stay with you and learn things.  I want to be like sister.  She was nice and wore pretty clothes.  She gave me some, but I don’t know where they are.  I don’t like this dress.  It’s black and all bad round the bottom where I fell into the mud.”

She looked down at her dress.  It showed, in spite of Mrs. Deo’s effort at cleaning it, signs of her tramp through the wet lane.  He looked at it too, but it was mechanically.  He was debating in his mind a formidable question.  Should he grasp her hand, insist that she was Georgian and demand her confidence and the truth? or should he follow the lawyer’s advice and continue to accept appearances, meet her on her own ground and give her the answer called for by her lonely and forsaken position?  He found after a moment’s thought that he had no choice; that he could not do the first and must do the last.

“You shall come with me,” said he quietly.  “I will see that you have every suitable protection and care.”

She surveyed him with the same unmoved inquiry burning in her eyes.