At that moment, an idea occurred to her. Her face, responsive as a wave to the wind, relaxed. Its sullenness disappeared in sudden brightness--in something like triumph. She raised her eyes. Their tremulous, half whimsical look set Winnington wondering what she could be going to say next. "You seem to have beaten me," she said, with a little nod--"or you think you have." "I have no thoughts that you mightn't know," was the quiet reply. "You want me to promise not to do it again?" "If you mean to keep it." As he stood by the fire, looking down upon her rather sternly--she yet perceived in his grey eyes, something of that expression she had seen there at their first meeting--as though the heart of a good man tried to speak to her. The same expression--and yet different; with something added and interfused, which moved her strangely. "Odd as it may seem, I will keep it!" she said. "Yet without giving up any earlier purpose, or promise, whatever." Each word was emphasized. His face changed. "I won't worry _you_ in any such way again," she added hastily and proudly. Some other words were on her lips, but she checked them. She held out her hand for the cheque, and the smile with which she accepted it, after her preceding passion, puzzled him. She locked up the cheque in a drawer of her writing-table. Winnington's horse passed the window, and he rose to go. She accompanied him to the hall door and waved a light farewell. Winnington's response was ceremonious. A sure instinct told him to shew no further softness. His dilemma was getting worse and worse, and Lady Tonbridge had been no use to him whatever. Chapter XII One of the first days of the New year rose clear and frosty. When the young housemaid who had temporarily replaced Weston as Delia's maid drew back her curtains at half-past seven, Delia caught a vision of an opaline sky with a sinking moon and fading stars. A strewing of snow lay on the ground, and the bare black trees rose, vividly separate, on the white stretches of grass. Her window looked to the north along the bases of the low range of hills which shut in the valley and the village. A patch of paler colour on the purple slope of the hills marked the long front of Monk Lawrence.