Hetty eyed him once more with the superiority of fact over fiction. She looked at him as if she saw through him, he thought, and, what was worse, undervalued him, and set him down as a deceiver. In reality Hetty was far too much perplexed and disturbed in her mind to come to any such decided conclusion. She was looking at him instinctively to try to make him out. And in this look a great many things were communicated by the one to the other which did not at all involve the immediate question. Hetty saw a face which was full of anxiety, and perhaps of desire to veil a certain secret, but which at the same time was open and true, the countenance of a man in whom guile was not. The true recognise the true, however different may be their mental altitude or position. She thought he was deceiving her, and yet by instinct she believed in him. And he saw, in the young face lifted to him with such troubled questioning, the look of a judge before whose decision he trembled. If she should judge him from the surface, as it was so natural she should--if she took the fiction on his lips for the indication of his character, the young doctor in a moment felt that the work in which he was engaged, and which already his conscience disapproved, would cost him dear. “Miss Asquith,” he said, hurriedly, “I must not stop to explain. Will you remember, whatever may happen, that I am always about? even when you don’t see anything of me, I’m near. Don’t let yourself be frightened; whatever happens, I am always near.” “It would be better to tell me what it is. Then I could not be frightened,” said Hetty, with as much calm as she could muster. But before he could reply, he no less than she started at the sound of a step--one step and no more, at which she clutched his arm with terror unspeakable, and he looked quickly round with a look of alarm in which there was no counterfeit. There was but one step, which was a thing to curdle the blood, as it seemed to Hetty, more than any succession of footsteps--one single stealthy step and no more. “Who is there? Speak,” cried the young doctor, with a voice which was not loud, but seemed to penetrate the intense morning stillness like a knife. And then, while Hetty stood speechless, there suddenly appeared round the corner of the house the paltry figure of Mrs. Mills the housekeeper, in extremely simple morning apparel, with a scared look in her face. “Oh, Mr. Darrell, is it you?” she cried in her turn, in a voice full of relief.