looking into her eyes inquiringly, like a dumb beast trying to feel out his master’s will in his face.  The evening was clear and the moon shining.  As Dick sat at his chamber-window, looking at the mountain-side, he saw a gray-dressed figure flit between the trees and steal along the narrow path which led upward.  Elsie’s pillow was unpressed that night, but she had not been missed by the household,—­for Dick knew enough to keep his own counsel.  The next morning she avoided him and went off early to school.  It was the same morning that the young master found the flower between the leaves of his Virgil.

The girl got over her angry fit, and was pleasant enough with her cousin for a few days after this; but she shunned rather than sought him.  She had taken a new interest in her books, and especially in certain poetical readings which the master conducted with the elder scholars.  This gave Master Langdon a good chance to study her ways when her eye was on her book, to notice the inflections of her voice, to watch for any expression of her sentiments; for, to tell the truth, he had a kind of fear that the girl had taken a fancy to him, and, though she interested him, he did not wish to study her heart from the inside.

The more he saw her, the more the sadness of her beauty wrought upon him.  She looked as if she might hate, but could not love.  She hardly smiled at anything, spoke rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, the force of which so many had felt, but none perhaps had tried to explain to themselves.  A person accustomed to watch the faces of those who were ailing in body or mind, and to search in every line and tint for some underlying source of disorder, could hardly help analyzing the impression such a face produced upon him.  The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears.  The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation.  There was in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love.  And yet the master could not help feeling that some instinct was working in this girl which was in some way leading her to seek his presence.  She did not lift her glittering eyes upon him as at first.  It seemed strange that she did not, for they were surely her natural weapons of conquest.  Her color did not come and go like that of young girls under excitement.  She had a clear brunette complexion, a little sun-touched, it may be,—­for the master noticed once, when her necklace was slightly displaced, that a faint ring or band of a little lighter shade than the rest of the surface encircled her neck.  What was the slight peculiarity of her enunciation, when she read?  Not a lisp, certainly, but the least possible imperfection in articulating some of the lingual sounds,—­just enough to be noticed at first, and quite forgotten after being a few times heard.