interested in anything but her own immediate affairs; besides, it never would have occurred to her to talk about her employer’s affairs, even if she had known anything about them.  An employer who was a gentleman, and very wealthy, belonged to the Established Order, and Mrs. MacGregor had the thorough-going British respect for Established Order.  Nancy, for her part, wished to forget that Peter existed.  She never by any chance mentioned him, or even thought of him if she could help it.  So when young Glenn Mitchell, after the pleasant South Carolina fashion, addressed her as “Miss Nancy” it seemed perfectly all right to everybody.

Nancy was a little over eighteen then.  She had grown taller, but she retained the pleasant angularity of extreme youth.  Because she didn’t know how to arrange her hair, Mrs. MacGregor sternly forbidding frizzing and curling, and insisting upon a “modest simplicity becoming to a young girl” she wore her red mane in a huge plait.  She had been so teased and badgered about her red hair, had hated it so heartily, been so ashamed of it, that she didn’t realize how magnificent it was now, after two years of care and cleanliness.  It wasn’t auburn; it wasn’t Titian; it was a bright, rich, glittering, unbuyable, undeniable red, and Nancy wore her plait as a boy wears a chip on his shoulder.  Young Glenn Mitchell was seized with a wild desire to catch hold of that braid that was like a cable of gleaming copper, and wind it around his wrists.  For the first time, he thought, he was seeing the true splendor and beauty of red hair; and the girl had the wonderfully white skin that accompanies it.  He suspected that she must have been pretty badly freckled when she was a child, for the freckles were still fairly visible, though one saw that they would presently vanish altogether.  The curve of her throat and chin, the “salt-cellars” at the base of the neck, left nothing to be desired.  Altogether there was that about this girl that caught and held his boyish attention.  It wasn’t that she was pretty,—­he had at first thought her plain.  It was rather that here lay a tantalizing promise of unfoldment by and by, a sheathed hint of something rare and perilous.

He didn’t quite know what to make of Mr. Champneys’s niece.  She was abnormally silent, unbelievably unobtrusive, singularly still.  Watching her, he found himself wishing she would smile, at least occasionally:  he longed to see what her mouth would look like if it should curve into laughter.  She had exquisite teeth, and her eyes, when one was allowed to get a glimpse of them, were of a curious, agaty, gray green, with one or two little spots or flecks in the iris.  Hers was an impassive, emotionless face; yet she gave a distinct impression of feeling, emotion, passion held in check; it was as if her feelings had been frozen.  But suppose a spring thaw should set in—­what then?  Would there be just a calm brook flowing underneath placid willows, or a tempestuous torrent sweeping all before it?  He wondered!