EVE had no sooner consented to take Mr. Coyshe, just to save herself the inconvenience of being questioned about the lost ring, than she ran out of the room, and to escape further importunity ran over the fields towards the wood. She had scarcely gone three steps from the house before she regretted what she had done. She did not care for Mr. Coyshe. She laughed at his peculiarities. She did not believe, like her father and sister, in his cleverness. But she saw that his ears and eyes were unduly prominent, and she was alive to the ridiculous. Mr. Coyshe was more to her fancy than most of the young men of the neighbourhood, who talked of nothing but sport, and who would grow with advancing age to talk of sport and rates, and beyond rates would not grow. Eve was not fond of hunting. Barbara rarely went after the hounds, Eve never. She did not love horse exercise; she preferred sauntering in the woods and lanes, gathering autumn-tinted blackberry leaves, to a run over the downs after a fox. Perhaps hunting required too much exertion for her: Eve did not care for exertion. She made dolls’ clothes still, at the age of seventeen; she played on the piano and sang; she collected leaves and flowers for posies. That was all Eve cared to do. Whatever she did she did it listlessly, because nothing thoroughly interested her. Yet she felt that there might be things which were not to be encountered at Morwell that would stir her heart and make her pulses bound. In a word, she had an artistic nature, and the world in which she moved was a narrow and inartistic world. Her proper faculties were unevoked. Her true nature slept. The hoot of an owl, followed by a queer little face peeping at her from behind a pine. She did not at once recognise Watt, as her mind was occupied with her engagement to Mr. Coyshe. Now at the very moment Watt showed himself her freakish mind had swerved from a position of disgust at her engagement, into one of semi-content with it. Mr. Coyshe was going to London, and there she would be free to enjoy herself after her own fashion, in seeing plays, hearing operas, going to all the sights of the great town, in a life of restless pleasure-seeking, and that was exactly what Eve desired. Watt looked woe-begone. He crept from behind the tree. His impudence and merriment had deserted him. Tears came into his eyes as he spoke. ‘Are they all gone?’ he asked, looking cautiously about. ‘Whom do you mean?’ ‘The police.’ ‘Yes, they have left Morwell. I do not know whither. Whether they are searching for your brother or have given up the search I cannot say. What keeps you here?’ ‘O Miss Eve! poor Martin is not far off. It would not do for him to run far. He is in hiding at no great distance, and—he has nothing to eat.’ ‘Where is he? What can I do?’ asked Eve, frightened.