insignificant physical proportions. Truly the sensitive little gentleman's lines had not fallen in pleasant places. And this was not all. There was another source of discouragement with which he had to battle in secret, though of this he would have felt it almost dishonor to complain. But Derrick's keen eyes had seen it long ago, and, understanding it well, he sympathized with his friend accordingly. Yet, despite the many rebuffs the curate had met with, he was not conquered by any means. His was not an easily subdued nature, after all. He was very warm on the subject of Joan Lowrie this evening—so warm, indeed, that the interest the mere sight of the girl had awakened in Derrick's mind was considerably heightened. They were still speaking of her when they stopped before the door of Grace's modest lodgings.
“You will come in, of course?” said Paul.
“Yes,” Derrick answered, “for a short time. I am tired and shall feel all the better for a cup of Mrs. Burnie's tea,” pushing the hair back from his forehead, as he had a habit of doing when a little excited.
He made the small parlor appear smaller than ever, when he entered it. He was obliged to bend his head when he passed through the door, and it was not until he had thrown himself into the largest easy chair, that the trim apartment seemed to regain its countenance.
Grace paused at the table, and with a sudden flush, took up a letter that lay there among two or three uninteresting-looking epistles.
“It is a note from Miss Anice,” he said, coming to the hearth and applying his pen-knife in a gentle way to the small square envelope.
“Not a letter, Grace?” said Derrick with a smile.
“A letter! Oh dear, no! She has never written me a letter. They are always notes with some sort of business object. She has very decided views on the subject of miscellaneous letter-writing.”
He read the note himself and then handed it to Derrick.
It was a compact, decided hand, free from the suspicion of an unnecessary curve.
“Dear Mr. Grace—
“Many thanks for the book. You are very kind indeed. Pray
let us hear something more about your people. I am afraid
papa must find them very discouraging, but I cannot help
feeling interested. Grandmamma wishes to be remembered to
you,
“With more thanks,
“Believe me your friend,
“Anice Barholm.”
Derrick refolded the note and handed it back to his friend. To tell the truth, it did not impress him very favorably. A girl not yet twenty years old, who could write such a note as this to a man who loved her, must be rather too self-contained and well balanced.
“You have never told me much of this story, Grace,” he said.
“There is not much to tell,” answered the curate, flushing again. “She is the Rector's daughter. I have known her three years. You remember I wrote to you about meeting her while you were in India. As for the rest, I do not exactly understand myself how it is that I have gone so far, having so—so little encouragement—in fact having had no encouragement at all; but, however that is, it has grown upon me, Derrick—my feeling for her has grown into my life. She has never cared for me. I am quite sure of that, you see. Indeed, I could hardly expect it. It is not her way to care for men as they are likely to care for her, though it will come some day, I suppose—with the coming man,” half smiling. “She is simply what she signs herself here, my friend Anice Barholm, and I am thankful for that much. She would not write even that if she did not mean it.”
“Bless my soul,” broke in Derrick, tossing back his head impatiently; “and she is only nineteen yet, you say?”
“Only nineteen,” said the curate, with simple trustfulness in his friend's sympathy, “but different, you know, from any other woman I have ever seen.”
The tea and toast came in then, and they sat down together to partake of it Derrick knew Anice quite well before the meal was ended, and yet he had not asked many questions. He knew how Grace had met her at her father's house—an odd, self-reliant, very pretty and youthful-looking little creature, with the force and decision of half a dozen ordinary women hidden in her small frame; how she had seemed to like him; how their intimacy had grown; how his gentle, deep-rooted passion had grown with it; how he had learned to understand that he had nothing to hope for.
“I am a little fearful for the result of her first visit here,” said Grace, pushing his cup aside and looking troubled. “I cannot bear to think of her being disappointed and disturbed by the half-savage state in which these people live. She knows nothing of the mining districts. She has never been in Lancashire, and they have always lived in the South. She is in Kent now, with Mrs. Barholm's mother. And though I have tried, in my short letters to her, to prepare her for the rough side of life she will be obliged to see, I am afraid it is impossible for her to realize it, and it may be a shock to her when she comes.”
“She is coming to Riggan then?” said Derrick.
“In a few weeks. She has been visiting Mrs. Galloway since the Rector gave up his living at Ashley wolde, and Mrs. Barholm told me to-day that she spoke in her last letter of coming to them.”
The moon was shining brightly when Derrick stepped out into the street later in the evening, and though the air was somewhat chill it was by no means unpleasant. He had rather a long walk before him. He disliked the smoke and dust of the murky little town, and chose to live on its outskirts; but he was fond of sharp exercise, and regarded the distance between his lodging and the field of his daily labor as an advantage.
“I work off a great deal of superfluous steam between the two places,” he said to Grace at the door. “The wind coming across Boggart Brow has a way of scattering and cooling restless plans and feverish fancies, that is good for a man. Half a mile of the Knoll Road is often enough to blow all the morbidness out of a fellow.”
To-night by the time he reached the corner that turned him upon the Knoll Road, his mind had wandered upon an old track, but it had been drawn there by a new object—nothing other than Joan Lowrie, indeed. The impression made upon him by the story of Joan and her outcast life was one not easy to be effaced. The hardest miseries in the lot of a class in whom he could not fail to be interested, were grouped about that dramatic figure. He was struck, too, by a painful sense of incongruity.
“If she had been in this other girl's niche,” he said, “if she had lived the life of this Anice——”
But he did not finish his sentence. Something, not many yards beyond him, caught his eye—a figure seated upon the road-side near a collier's cottage—evidently a pit girl in some trouble, for her head was bowed upon her hands, and there was a dogged sort of misery expressed in her very posture.
“A woman,” he said aloud. “What woman, I wonder. This is not the time for any woman to be sitting here alone.”
He crossed the road at once, and going to the girl, touched her lightly on the shoulder.
“My lass,” he said good-naturedly, “what ails you?”
She raised her head slowly as if she were
