Summer | Page 9

his humbled pride
was her surest protection. He had never spoken a word of excuse or
extenuation; the incident was as if it had never been. Yet its
consequences were latent in every word that he and she exchanged, in
every glance they instinctively turned from each other. Nothing now
would ever shake her rule in the red house.
On the night of her meeting with Miss Hatchard's cousin Charity lay in
bed, her bare arms clasped under her rough head, and continued to
think of him. She supposed that he meant to spend some time in North
Dormer. He had said he was looking up the old houses in the
neighbourhood; and though she was not very clear as to his purpose, or
as to why anyone should look for old houses, when they lay in wait for

one on every roadside, she understood that he needed the help of books,
and resolved to hunt up the next day the volume she had failed to find,
and any others that seemed related to the subject.
Never had her ignorance of life and literature so weighed on her as in
reliving the short scene of her discomfiture. "It's no use trying to be
anything in this place," she muttered to her pillow; and she shrivelled at
the vision of vague metropolises, shining super-Nettletons, where girls
in better clothes than Belle Balch's talked fluently of architecture to
young men with hands like Lucius Harney's. Then she remembered his
sudden pause when he had come close to the desk and had his first look
at her. The sight had made him forget what he was going to say; she
recalled the change in his face, and jumping up she ran over the bare
boards to her washstand, found the matches, lit a candle, and lifted it to
the square of looking-glass on the white-washed wall. Her small face,
usually so darkly pale, glowed like a rose in the faint orb of light, and
under her rumpled hair her eyes seemed deeper and larger than by day.
Perhaps after all it was a mistake to wish they were blue. A clumsy
band and button fastened her unbleached night-gown about the throat.
She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw herself a bride in
low-necked satin, walking down an aisle with Lucius Harney. He
would kiss her as they left the church.... She put down the candle and
covered her face with her hands as if to imprison the kiss. At that
moment she heard Mr. Royall's step as he came up the stairs to bed, and
a fierce revulsion of feeling swept over her. Until then she had merely
despised him; now deep hatred of him filled her heart. He became to
her a horrible old man....
The next day, when Mr. Royall came back to dinner, they faced each
other in silence as usual. Verena's presence at the table was an excuse
for their not talking, though her deafness would have permitted the
freest interchange of confidences. But when the meal was over, and Mr.
Royall rose from the table, he looked back at Charity, who had stayed
to help the old woman clear away the dishes.
"I want to speak to you a minute," he said; and she followed him across
the passage, wondering.

He seated himself in his black horse-hair armchair, and she leaned
against the window, indifferently. She was impatient to be gone to the
library, to hunt for the book on North Dormer.
"See here," he said, "why ain't you at the library the days you're
supposed to be there?"
The question, breaking in on her mood of blissful abstraction, deprived
her of speech, and she stared at him for a moment without answering.
"Who says I ain't?"
"There's been some complaints made, it appears. Miss Hatchard sent
for me this morning----"
Charity's smouldering resentment broke into a blaze. "I know! Orma
Fry, and that toad of a Targatt girl and Ben Fry, like as not. He's going
round with her. The low-down sneaks--I always knew they'd try to have
me out! As if anybody ever came to the library, anyhow!"
"Somebody did yesterday, and you weren't there."
"Yesterday?" she laughed at her happy recollection. "At what time
wasn't I there yesterday, I'd like to know?"
"Round about four o'clock."
Charity was silent. She had been so steeped in the dreamy
remembrance of young Harney's visit that she had forgotten having
deserted her post as soon as he had left the library.
"Who came at four o'clock?"
"Miss Hatchard did."
"Miss Hatchard? Why, she ain't ever been near the place since she's
been lame. She couldn't get up the steps if she tried."
"She can be helped up, I guess. She was yesterday, anyhow, by the

young fellow that's staying