“I am so glad he likes you!” she would say.

“Why should she be glad?” thought Hugh.

This gentle claim of a kind of property in him, added considerably to the strength of the attraction that drew him towards her, as towards the centre of his spiritual gravitation; if indeed that could be called spiritual which had so little of the element of moral or spiritual admiration, or even approval, mingled with it.  He never felt that Euphra was good.  He only felt that she drew him with a vague force of feminine sovereignty —­ a charm which he could no more resist or explain, than the iron could the attraction of the lodestone.  Neither could he have said, had he really considered the matter, that she was beautiful —­ only that she often, very often, looked beautiful.  I suspect if she had been rather ugly, it would have been all the same for Hugh.

He pursued his Italian studies with a singleness of aim and effort that carried him on rapidly.  He asked no assistance from Euphra, and said nothing to her about his progress.  But he was so absorbed in it, that it drew him still further from his pupil.  Of course he went out with him, walking or riding every day that the weather would permit; and he had regular school hours with him within doors.  But during the latter, while Harry was doing something on his slate, or writing, or learning some lesson (which kind of work happened oftener now than he could have approved of), he would take up his Italian; and, notwithstanding Harry’s quiet hints that he had finished what had been set him, remain buried in it for a long time.  When he woke at last to the necessity of taking some notice of the boy, he would only appoint him something else to occupy him again, so as to leave himself free to follow his new bent.  Now and then he would become aware of his blameable neglect, and make a feeble struggle to rectify what seemed to be growing into a habit —­ and one of the worst for a tutor; but he gradually sank back into the mire, for mire it was, comforting himself with the resolution that as soon as he was able to read Italian without absolutely spelling his way, he would let Euphra see what progress he had made, and then return with renewed energy to Harry’s education, keeping up his own new accomplishment by more moderate exercise therein.  It must not be supposed, however, that a long course of time passed in this way.  At the end of a fortnight, he thought he might venture to request Euphra to show him the passage which had perplexed her.  This time he knew where she was —­ in her own room; for his mind had begun to haunt her whereabouts.  He knocked at her door, heard the silvery, thrilling, happy sound, “Come in;” and entered trembling.

“Would you show me the passage in Dante that perplexed you the other day?”

Euphra looked a little surprised; but got the book and pointed it out at once.

Hugh glanced at it.  His superior acquaintance with the general forms of language enabled him, after finding two words in Euphra’s larger dictionary, to explain it, to her immediate satisfaction.