The churn was a hideous American patent, but light and very convenient.  They talked to the monotonous splash of the milk within, and as work was not being interrupted, Alec was at length asked to sit down on the worn doorstep, and he remained there until the butter “came.”  He had gone up in Sophia’s esteem many degrees, because she saw now that any escape of warmer sentiment had been involuntary on his part.  She blessed him in her heart for being at once so susceptible and so strong.  She fancied that there was a shade of sadness in his coolness which lent it attraction.  With that shadow of the epicurean which is apt to be found upon all civilised hearts, she felt that it did her good to realise how nice he was, just as a fresh flower or a strong wind would have done her good.  She said to him that she supposed he would not be staying much longer in Chellaston, and he replied that as soon as Bates would go and his brother was on his feet again he intended to leave for the West.  Then he begged her to lose no time in seeing Eliza, for Bates had taken to hobbling about the roads, and he thought a sudden and accidental meeting with the girl might be the death of him.

Now this assertion of Alec’s, that Bates had taken to walking out of doors, was based on the fact told him by Mrs. Martha and his brother, that the day before Bates had wilfully walked forth, and after some hours came back much exhausted.  “Where did you go?” Alec had asked him fiercely, almost suspecting, from his abject looks, that he had seen the girl.  He could, however, learn nothing but that the invalid had walked “down the road and rested a while and come back.”  Nothing important had happened, Alec thought; and yet this conclusion was not true.

That which had happened had been this.  John Bates, after lying for a week trying to devise some cunning plan for seeing Sissy without compromising her, and having failed in this, rose up in the sudden energy of a climax of impatience, and, by dint of short stages and many rests by the roadside, found his way through the town, up the steps of the hotel, and into its bar-room.  No one could hinder him from going there, thought he, and perchance he might see the lassie.

Years of solitude, his great trouble, and, lastly, the complaint which rendered him so obviously feeble, had engendered in his heart a shyness that made it terrible to him to go alone across the hotel verandah, where men and women were idling.  In truth, though he was obviously ill, the people noticed him much less than he supposed, for strangers often came there; but egotism is a knife which shyness uses to wound itself with.  When he got into the shaded and comparatively empty bar-room, he would have felt more at home, had it not been for the disconsolate belief that there was one at home in that house to whom his presence would be terribly unwelcome.  It was with a nightmare of pain and desolation on his heart that he laid trembling arms upon the bar, and began to chat with the landlord.