“I met her ten minutes ago, walking on this road.  She was a great big buxom girl, with a white face and red hair; perhaps people might call her handsome.  I pulled up and stared at her, but she went on as if she didn’t see me.  Now I’m going in to tell Bates, and then I shall go back and bring her to book.  I don’t know what she may be up to in Chellaston, but she must be found.”

“Many people do think her handsome, Mr. Trenholme,” said Sophia, for she knew now who it was; “and she is certainly not—­the sort of—­”

“Do you mean to say you know her?”

“Yes, I know her quite well.  I had something to do with bringing her to Chellaston.  I never knew till this moment that she was the girl you and Mr. Bates have been seeking, and indeed—­” She stopped, confused, for, although it had flashed on her for the first time that what she knew of Eliza’s history tallied with his story, she could not make it all match, and then she perceived that no doubt it was in the Harmon house that Eliza had so faithfully sought the letters now held in her own hand.  “Really,” she continued, “you mustn’t go to work with this girl in the summary manner you suggest.  I know her too well to think anything could be gained by that.  She is, in a sense, a friend of mine.”

“Don’t say she is a friend of yours—­don’t!” he said, with almost disgust in his tone.

They had halted in the lane just outside the yard gate, and now he put down the pail and turned his back on the still shut gate to speak with more freedom.  As he talked, the brisk air dashed about the boughs of the spindling lilac hedge, shaking slant sunbeams upon the unpainted gate and upon the young man and woman in front of it.

Then, but in a way that was graphic because of strong feeling, Alec Trenholme told the more real part of the story which he had outlined the night before; told of the melancholy solitude in which Bates had been left with the helpless old woman in a house that was bewitched in the eyes of all, so that no servant or labourer would come near it.  In talk that was a loose mosaic of detail and generalisation, he told of the woman’s work to which the proud Scotchman had been reduced in care of the aunt who in his infancy had cared for him, and how he strove to keep the house tidy for her because she fretted when she saw housework ill-done.  He explained that Bates would have been reduced to hard straits for want of the yearly income from his lumber had not he himself “chanced” to go and help him.  He said that Bates had gone through all this without complaint, without even counting it hard, because of the grief he counted so much worse—­the loss of the girl, and the belief that she had perished because of his unkindness.

“For he loved her, Miss Rexford.  He had never had anyone else to care for, and he had just centred his whole heart on her.  He cared for her as if she had been his daughter and sister, and—­and he cared for her in another way that was more than all.  It was a lonely enough place; no one could blame a woman for wanting to leave it; but to leave a man to think her dead when he loved her!”