Without seeing very much of the two women, he still found himself led to think of them constantly. He was vaguely conscious that since their interview in the grave-yard, he had never felt free from Christian Murdoch. More than once her mother's words came back to him with startling force. "She sits and looks on and says nothing. She asks nothing, but her eyes force me to speak." He knew that she was constantly watching him. Often he looked up and met her glance, and somehow it was always a kind of shock to him. He knew that she was wondering and asking herself questions she could not ask him. "If I gave it up or flagged," he told himself, "she would know without my saying a word." There had grown in her a beauty of a dark, foreign type. The delicate olive of her skin and the dense blackness of her eyes and hair caused her to be considered a novelty worth commenting upon by the men of Broxton society, which was of a highly critical nature. She went out a great deal as the spring advanced and began to know the place and people better. She developed a pathetic eagerness to make friends and understand those around her. One day, she went alone to Broxton Chapel and after sitting through one of Mr. Hixon's most sulphurous sermons, came home in a brooding mood. "Why did you go?" Murdoch was roused to ask. "I thought," she answered, "it might make me better. I thought I would try." Not long afterward, when he had gone out of the house and she was left sitting with Mrs. Murdoch, she suddenly looked up from the carpet on which her eyes had been fixed and asked her a question. "Is it true that I am beginning to be very handsome?" she demanded. "Yes," Mrs. Murdoch answered, "it is true." A dark cloud settled upon her face and her eyes fell again. "I heard some men in the street speak aloud to each other about it," she said. "Do they speak so of _all_ women who are handsome?" "I don't know," her companion replied, surveying her critically and with some anxiety. "They used to speak so of--_her_," she said, slowly. "_She_ was a beautiful woman. They were always telling her of it again and again, and I used to go and look at myself in the glass and be glad that I was thin and dark and ugly and that they laughed at me. I wanted to be hideous. Once, when I was a child, a man said: 'Never mind, she will be a beauty some day--like her mother!' and I flew at him and struck him, and then I ran away to my room and fell down upon my knees and said the first prayer I ever said in my life. I said, 'O God!--if there is a God--strike me dead! O God!--if there is a God--strike me dead!'" The woman who listened shuddered. "_Am_ I like--anybody?" she said next. "I do not know," was the answer. "I could not tell myself, if I were," she said. "I have watched for it for so long that I should not see it if it had come. I look every day. Perhaps I am and do not know. Perhaps that is why they look at me in the street, and speak of me loud as I go by."