Sophia did not wait till after dark: it might be an excellent way for Miss Bennett, but it was not her way. Neither did she ask her younger sisters to help her, for she knew that if caught in the act by any acquaintance the girls were at an age to feel an acute distress. She succeeded, by the administration of tea and tonic, in coaxing the servant to perform her part. Having slightly caught up her skirts and taken the empty pails on her arms, Sophia started ahead down the lane.

Just then some one turned in from the road. It was Eliza, and she was in too much haste to take heed of the milking gear.

"Oh, Miss Sophia. I'm so glad I've met you, and alone. We've been so busy at the hotel with a cheap excursion, I've been trying all day to get a word to you. Look here!" (she thrust some crumpled letters into Sophia's hand) "I thought you'd better see those, and say something to the girls. They'll get themselves into trouble if they go on as silly as this. It seems it's some silly 'post office' they've had in a tree between them and that Harkness. I've had that letter from him, and certainly, Miss Sophia, if he's as much to blame as them, he's acted civil enough now. He had a better heart than most men, I believe, for all he bragged about it. He forgot where he had thrown their letters as waste paper, and you'll see by that letter of his he took some trouble to write to me to go and get them, for fear they should be found and the girls talked about."

Sophia stood still in dismay.

"There!" said Eliza, "I knew you'd feel hurt, but I thought you'd better know for all that. There's no harm done, only they'd better have a good setting down about it." She began to turn back again. "I must go," she said, "the dining-room girls are rushed off their feet; but if I were you, Miss Sophia, I wouldn't say a word to anyone else about it. Some one came in while I was getting these letters, but it was dark and I dodged round and made off without being seen, so that I needn't explain.

It wouldn't do for the girls, you know--"

Sophia turned the letters about in her hand. One was from Cyril Harkness to Eliza; the others were poor, foolish little notes, written by Blue and Red. Louise came out of the yard and pa.s.sed them into the field, and Sophia thrust the letters into her dress.

That Eliza should navely give her advice concerning the training of her sisters was a circ.u.mstance so in keeping with the girl's force of character that her late mistress hardly gave it a thought, nor had she time at that moment to wonder where the letters had been left and found.

It was the thought that the family reputation for sense and sobriety had apparently been in the hands of an unprincipled stranger, and had been preserved only by his easy good-nature and by Eliza's energy, that struck her with depressing and irritating force. Had the girls come in her way just then, the words she would have addressed to them would have been more trenchant than wise, but as Eliza was by her side, retreating towards the road, she felt no desire to discuss the matter with her.

She observed now that Eliza looked worn and miserable as she had never seen her look before, unless, indeed, it had been in the first few days she ever saw her. The crowded state of the hotel could hardly account for this. "I hope, Eliza, that having despised that suitor of yours when he was here, you are not repenting now he is gone."

The girl looked at her dully, not understanding at first.

"Speaking of Cyril Harkness?" she cried; "good gracious, no, Miss Sophia." But the response was not given in a sprightly manner, and did not convey any conviction of its truth.

"You must be working too hard."

"Well, I needn't. I'll tell you a bit of good fortune that's come to me.

Mrs. Gla.s.s--one of our boarders--you know her?"

"The stout person that comes to church in red satin?"

"Yes; and she's rich too. Well, she's asked me to go and visit her in Montreal in the slack time this next winter; and she's such a good boarder every summer, you know, Mr. Hutchins is quite set on me going.

She's promised to take me to parties and concerts, and the big rink, and what not. Ah, Miss Sophia, you never thought I could come that sort of thing so soon, did you?"

"And are you not going?"

Sophia's question arose from a certain ring of mockery in Eliza's relation of her triumph.

"No, I'm not going a step. D'you think I'm going to be beholden to her, vulgar old thing! And besides, she talks about getting me married. I think there's nothing so miserable in the world as to be married."

"Most women are much happier married." Sophia said this with orthodox propriety, although she did not altogether believe it.

"Yes, when they can't fend for themselves, poor things. But to be for ever tied to a house and a man, never to do just what one liked! I'm going to take pattern by you, Miss Sophia, and not get married."

Eliza went back to the village, and Sophia turned toward the pasture and the college. The first breath of autumn wind was sweeping down the road to meet her. All about the first sparks of the great autumnal fire of colour were kindling. In the nearer wood she noticed stray boughs of yellow or pink foliage displayed hanging over the dark tops of young spruce trees, or waving against the blue of the unclouded sky. It was an air to make the heavy heart jocund in spite of itself, and the sweet influences of this blithe evening in the pasture field were not lost upon Sophia, although she had not the spirit now to wish mischievously, as before, that Mrs. and Miss Bennett, or some of their friends, would pa.s.s to see her carry the milk in daylight. It was a happy pride that had been at the root of her defiance of public opinion, and her pride was depressed now, smarting under the sharp renewal of the conviction that her sisters were naughty and silly, and that their present training was largely to blame.

The Bennetts did not come by, neither did Mrs. Brown's carriage pa.s.s, nor a brake from the hotel. Sophia had carried home the milk of two cows and returned before anyone of the slightest consequence pa.s.sed by. She was just starting with two more pails when Alec Trenholme came along at a fast trot on his brother's handsome cob. He was close by her before she had time to see who it was, and when he drew up his horse she felt strangely annoyed. Instinct told her that, while others might have criticised, this simple-hearted fellow would only compa.s.sionate her toil. Their mutual adventure of the previous evening had so far established a sense of comradeship with him that she did not take refuge in indifference, but felt her vanity hurt at his pity.

At that moment the simple iron semi-circle which the milk maid used to hold her pails off her skirts, became, with Sophia's handling, the most complex thing, and would in no wise adjust itself. Alec jumped from his horse, hung his bridle-rein over the gate-post as he entered the pasture, and made as if to take the pails as a matter of course.

Pride, vanity, conceit, whatever it may be that makes people dislike kindness when their need is obvious, produced in her an awkward gaiety.

"Nay," said she, refusing; "why should you carry my milk for me?"

"Well, for one thing, we live too near not to know you don't do it usually."

"Still, it may be my special pleasure to carry it to-night; and if not, why should you help me with this any more than, for instance, in cooking the dinner to-morrow? I a.s.sure you my present pastoral occupation is much more romantic and picturesque than that."

But he took the half-filled pails (she had not attempted to carry full ones), and, pouring the contents of one into the other, proceeded to carry it.

"Since it is you who command," she cried, "shall I hold your horse in the meantime?"

With provoking literalism he gave a critical glance at the bridle. "He's all right," he said, not caring much, in truth, whether the cob broke loose or not.

So she followed him across the road into the lane, because it hardly seemed civil to let him go alone, and because he would not know what to do with the milk when he got to the yard. She did not, however, like this position.

"Do you know," she began again, "that I am very angry with you, Mr.

Trenholme?"

He wished for several reasons that she would cease her banter, and he had another subject to advance, which he now brought forward abruptly.

"I don't know, Miss Rexford, what right I have to think you will take any interest in what interests me, but, after what happened last night, I can't help telling you that I've got to the bottom of that puzzle, and I'm afraid it will prove a very serious matter for my poor friend Bates."

"What is it?" she cried, his latest audacity forgotten.

"Just now, as I came out of the village, I met the person I saw in the Harmon house, and the same I saw before, the time I told you of. It was a woman--a young woman dressed in silk. I don't know what she may be doing here, but I know now _who_ she must be. She must be Sissy Cameron.

No other girl could have been at Turrifs Station the night I saw her there. She _is_ Sissy Cameron." (His voice grew fiercer.) "She must have turned her father's hea.r.s.e into a vehicle for her own tricks; and what's more, she must, with the most deliberate cruelty, have kept the knowledge of her safety from poor Bates all these months."

"Stay, stay!" cried Sophia, for his voice had grown so full of anger against the girl that he could hardly pour out the tale of her guilt fast enough. "Where did you meet her? What was she like?"

"I met her ten minutes ago, walking on this road. She was a great big buxom girl, with a white face and red hair; perhaps people might call her handsome. I pulled up and stared at her, but she went on as if she didn't see me. Now I'm going in to tell Bates, and then I shall go back and bring her to book. I don't know what she may be up to in Ch.e.l.laston, but she must be found."

"Many people do think her handsome, Mr. Trenholme," said Sophia, for she knew now who it was; "and she is certainly not--the sort of--"

"Do you mean to say you know her?"

"Yes, I know her quite well. I had something to do with bringing her to Ch.e.l.laston. I never knew till this moment that she was the girl you and Mr. Bates have been seeking, and indeed--" She stopped, confused, for, although it had flashed on her for the first time that what she knew of Eliza's history tallied with his story, she could not make it all match, and then she perceived that no doubt it was in the Harmon house that Eliza had so faithfully sought the letters now held in her own hand.

"Really," she continued, "you mustn't go to work with this girl in the summary manner you suggest. I know her too well to think anything could be gained by that. She is, in a sense, a friend of mine."

"Don't say she is a _friend_ of yours--_don't!_" he said, with almost disgust in his tone.

They had halted in the lane just outside the yard gate, and now he put down the pail and turned his back on the still shut gate to speak with more freedom. As he talked, the brisk air dashed about the boughs of the spindling lilac hedge, shaking slant sunbeams upon the unpainted gate and upon the young man and woman in front of it.

Then, but in a way that was graphic because of strong feeling, Alec Trenholme told the more real part of the story which he had outlined the night before; told of the melancholy solitude in which Bates had been left with the helpless old woman in a house that was bewitched in the eyes of all, so that no servant or labourer would come near it. In talk that was a loose mosaic of detail and generalisation, he told of the woman's work to which the proud Scotchman had been reduced in care of the aunt who in his infancy had cared for him, and how he strove to keep the house tidy for her because she fretted when she saw housework ill-done. He explained that Bates would have been reduced to hard straits for want of the yearly income from his lumber had not he himself "chanced" to go and help him. He said that Bates had gone through all this without complaint, without even counting it hard, because of the grief he counted so much worse--the loss of the girl, and the belief that she had perished because of his unkindness.

"For he _loved_ her, Miss Rexford. He had never had anyone else to care for, and he had just centred his whole heart on her. He cared for her as if she had been his daughter and sister, and--and he cared for her in another way that was more than all. It was a lonely enough place; no one could blame a woman for wanting to leave it; but to leave a man to think her dead when he loved her!"

Sophia was touched by the story and touched nearly also by the heart of the man who told it, for in such telling the hearts of speaker and listener beat against one another through finer medium than that which we call s.p.a.ce. But just because she was touched it was characteristic in her to find a point that she could a.s.sail.

"I don't see that a woman is specially beholden to a man because he loves her against her will."

"Do you mean to say"--fiercely--"that she was not beholden to him because he taught her everything she knew, and was willing to work to support her?"