had time to enter this way, voices on the other side of the boulder startled her.  Her first thought was that Lady Dacre and her husband had come back.  But she perceived that the tones were Bulchester’s.  She stood still an instant, wishing that she could reach the road without being obliged to talk to him or any one, she felt so little like it.  But there was no hope of that.  There was a rough seat cut in the stone on the other side; the views landward and seaward were delightful; the great elm near by shaded the place, and Bulchester had probably ensconced himself there with somebody else.  She must go by, and if they even joined her, it was no matter.  She made a movement forward, when Edrnonson’s voice with a ring that she had never heard in it came to her ears.  Yet it was not his tones, but his words, that made her cower and stand motionless with startled eyes and parted lips, until, slowly, as wonder grew into disgust, her face crimsoned from brow to throat and drooped, as if to hide from itself.  Was this the way that men spoke of women, with sneers, with scoffing?  In all her innocent life she had never looked even through bars at the world that such expressions revealed, dimly enough to her veiled in her simplicity.

The Puritan spirit of her country, that although it sometimes put bands on the freeman, chained the brute in human nature in his dungeon, lest his breath in the land should breed death, had been in such accord with her own fair womanhood that she had not realized that all the world was not as safe as her own home, as safe, though not as happy.  Yet the sneer that Edmonson had spoken seemed to him so slight, so much a matter of course, that it was forgotten as soon as uttered; it was merely his way of looking at a world unknown to his listener.  She did not know of what woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of some one she had never seen.  It was not at the stranger alone; it was through her at all women that the mire of suspicion had been thrown.

She could not go forward now, and while she stood trying to grow calm through her indignation and seeing that she must go home by the other road, which would take her quite a distance out of her way, scraps of the conversation that fell upon her ears found lodgment in her mind.  The two seemed to be talking of some man now.  Then all at once she heard Bulchester say: 

“It’s the oddity that takes you;”—­she had lost what went before—­“that will soon wear off.  But I’m glad enough you’re not as wise as I, to prefer the other.  What makes you so sure, though, that he has secured your—?” In some movement she lost the last word and the answer, unless it were merely a significant exclamation of belief.  “You wouldn’t stand upon the chances of change though,” resumed Bulchester, “I know you well enough.  But, according to you, there’s the insuperable obstacle.”

Edmonson laughed contemptuously.

“Insuperable?” he answered.  “Stray shots have taken off more superfluous kings and men than the world knows of.  And just now, with this prospect of war before the country, something is sure to happen,—­to happen, Bulchester; luck has a passion for me, and after all her caprices, she is coming to—.”