as pink as ever, and she smiled as much as she had ever done of late, but there was something different in her eyes, in the expression of her face, in all her movements, Adam thought—­something harder, older, less child-like.  “Poor thing!” he said to himself, “that’s allays likely.  It’s because she’s had her first heartache.  But she’s got a spirit to bear up under it.  Thank God for that.”

As the weeks went by, and he saw her always looking pleased to see him—­turning up her lovely face towards him as if she meant him to understand that she was glad for him to come—­and going about her work in the same equable way, making no sign of sorrow, he began to believe that her feeling towards Arthur must have been much slighter than he had imagined in his first indignation and alarm, and that she had been able to think of her girlish fancy that Arthur was in love with her and would marry her as a folly of which she was timely cured.  And it perhaps was, as he had sometimes in his more cheerful moments hoped it would be—­her heart was really turning with all the more warmth towards the man she knew to have a serious love for her.

Possibly you think that Adam was not at all sagacious in his interpretations, and that it was altogether extremely unbecoming in a sensible man to behave as he did—­falling in love with a girl who really had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her, attributing imaginary virtues to her, and even condescending to cleave to her after she had fallen in love with another man, waiting for her kind looks as a patient trembling dog waits for his master’s eye to be turned upon him.  But in so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exceptions.  Of course, I know that, as a rule, sensible men fall in love with the most sensible women of their acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish beauty, never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved, cease loving on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most fitted for them in every respect—­indeed, so as to compel the approbation of all the maiden ladies in their neighbourhood.  But even to this rule an exception will occur now and then in the lapse of centuries, and my friend Adam was one.  For my own part, however, I respect him none the less—­nay, I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature and not out of any inconsistent weakness.  Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?  To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all