Well,—­there were two things quite certain.  One was, that, if he chose, he could meet the schoolmaster alone, either in the road or in a more solitary place, if he preferred to watch his chance for an evening or two.  The other was, that he commanded his position, as he sat at his desk in the evening, in such a way that there would be very little difficulty,—­so far as that went; of course, however, silence is always preferable to noise, and there is a great difference in the marks left by different casualties.  Very likely nothing would come of all this espionage; but, at any rate, the first thing to be done with a man you want to have in your power is to learn his habits.

Since the tea-party at the Widow Rowens’s, Elsie had been more fitful and moody than ever.  Dick understood all this well enough, you know.  It was the working of her jealousy against that young schoolgirl to whom the master had devoted himself for the sake of piquing the heiress of the Dudley mansion.  Was it possible, in any way, to exasperate her irritable nature against him, and in this way to render her more accessible to his own advances?  It was difficult to influence her at all.  She endured his company without seeming to enjoy it.  She watched him with that strange look of hers, sometimes as if she were on her guard against him, sometimes as if she would like to strike at him as in that fit of childish passion.  She ordered him about with a haughty indifference which reminded him of his own way with the dark-eyed women whom he had known so well of old.  All this added a secret pleasure to the other motives he had for worrying her with jealous suspicions.  He knew she brooded silently on any grief that poisoned her comfort,—­that she fed on it, as it were, until it ran with every drop of blood in her veins,—­and that, except in some paroxysm of rage, of which he himself was not likely the second time to be the object, or in some deadly vengeance wrought secretly, against which he would keep a sharp lookout, so far as he was concerned, she had no outlet for her dangerous, smouldering passions.

Beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy inner life either in words or song!  So long as a woman can talk, there is nothing she cannot bear.  If she cannot have a companion to listen to her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental,—­then, if she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood in her, and you have done her a wrong,—­double-bolt the door which she may enter on noiseless slipper at midnight,—­look twice before you taste of any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened!

But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is tired, she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment.