The Shuttle

her her exquisite appreciation of values and effects, she took with her when she went the next day to Charing Cross

in. For practical reasons she was summing up English character with more deliberate intention than she had felt in the years when she had gradually learned to know Continental types and differentiate such peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind. As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of purpose and alertness of brain to be

ready touched with suburbanity behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious enjoyment in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar, objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks and beeches were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green than anything she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at their best. Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with their young lambs about them. The curious pointed tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses, wore a

ny trees, sometimes in lovely clusters, sometimes in covering copse, was Constable's; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from the wooden pig

literary parallel. We almost invariably say that things remind us of pictures or books-most usually book

d by the train's slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the rural-looking little stat

nger. He thought she must be a visitor expected at some country house, but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar acquaintances, were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be paying a visit at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend he

e going to visit, he did not know when a young lady had "caught his eye," so to speak, as this one did. She was not exactly the kind of young lady one would immediately class mentally as "a foreigner," but t

tina had purposely left her maid in town. If awkward things occurred, the presence of an attendan

rom Stornham Cour

pressed something which to the rural and ingenuous, whose st

one such as her, for certain. She don't live anywhere on the line above here, either, for I've never seen her face before. She was a tall, handsome one-she was,

ne of HIS fine lad

as for that, I wonder what he'd

of fields and the scented hedges. The soft beauty enclosing her was a little shut out from her by her mental attitude. She brought forward for her own decisions upon suitable action a number of possible situations she might fin

o find one's self face to face with. It will be a little awkward to arran

lf under any circumstances not partaking of the nature of collisions at sea. Yet she had not behaved absolutely ill at the time of the threatened catastrophe in the Meridiana. Her remembrance, an oddl

t struck her as looking neglected. Many of the cottages had an air of dilapidation. There were many bro

ds," she said, looking through her carriage wind

cture was out of order, and that damaged diamond panes peered out

promise as it should. Happy people

sudden remote fear which arose in her rapidly reasoning mind. It suggested to her a point of view so new that, while she was amazed at herself for not hav

pool. The bracken was thick and high there, and the sun, which had j

man and a hunchbacked boy. The woman held some ferns in her hand, and the boy was sit

na said to the coachman. "I wan

r was at the Court. She realised that to know would

she said, "I wonder

tle. She had a listless step

you ask?

d still fur

s her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of the thin

umping, as she had heard it said

egan

it she felt the blood surge up from the furious heart, and the hand she ha

swered her indifferently,

Anstruthers

carriage door and s

er to the coachman, and, with a so

was a hushed, almost awe

ck of a creature beg

ed, with a small,

g arms, against a quickly beating heart. She was being wild

ook at me, Rosy! I am Betty

steric laugh. She suddenly clutched at Bettina's ar

No! No! No! I can't belie

should not have changed a pretty blonde thing of nineteen to a worn, unintelligent-looking dowdy of the order of dowdiness which seems to have lived beyond age and sex. She looked even stupid, or at leas

t again, and began to shiver. "Bett

had lifted his chin from

e called to him. "Come

nd began to cry. She hid her face in h

s so long ago-it's so far away. Y

ped up on his stick. He spoke like an eld

e said. "Don't let it upse

y!" she wept, with catches in her

ded her again. Her bell-li

nd it is not far away. A cable

d thought in her mind,

with accustomed coolness, and she felt her sister actually

re was even a kind of wan awakening in her face, as she lifted it to look at the wo

o a sobbing, shaken heap upon the heather. The harrowing thought passed through Betty's mind that she loo

he gasped. "It's nothi

red, in his mature way. "She can't help it s

the water. She was back in a moment. The boy was

as one consoled by a reflect