Their eyes met once in the look she cast round the room. Great Heaven, what regretful tenderness in hers! Such a look as that maddened him. Had she but looked at him thus to-day in the garden, he would surely have done something desperate—clasped her in his arms, and sworn to carry her to the uttermost ends of the earth, if thereby he might be sure of his prize. Could she look at him thus, she who had been colder than the icy breath of the polar seas, when he had pleaded with all the force of his passion two short hours ago? His eyes never left her face while she sang. When she vanished, the platform was a blank. Other performers came and went; there was other music, vocal and instrumental—to him it seemed no more than the vague murmur of a far-off waterfall in the ears of slumber. She came back again, after an interval that seemed intolerably long, and sang something of Balfe’s—a poem by Longfellow, called ‘Daybreak’—mournful, like most of her songs, but full of music. During the interval between the two concerts Geoffrey paced Stillmington and its environs with an indefatigable industry that might have shamed the local postman, for _he_ at least was weary, while Geoffrey knew not weariness. Vainly did he haunt that aristocratic High-street, vainly linger by the door of the circulating library, the fancy repository, the music-shop where somebody was perpetually trying pianos with woolly basses and tinkling trebles; vainly did he stroll in and out of the garden where he had dared to molest Mrs. Bertram with his unwelcome adoration,—she was nowhere to be met with. One comfort only remained to him, a foolish one, like all those fancies whence love derives consolation. He knew where his enchantress lived, and in the quiet dusk, when the gentle hush of evening enfolded Stillmington like a mantle, he would venture to pace the lonely street beneath her windows; would watch her taper gleaming faintly in that gray nightfall which was not yet darkness, would, as it were, project his spirit into her presence, and keep her company in spite of herself. The street where she lodged was on the outskirts of the town, newly built—a street of commonplace dwellings of the speculative builder’s pattern; a row of square boxes, with not a variation of an inch from number one to number thirty; sordid, unpicturesque: habitations which even love could not beautify. Mrs. Bertram occupied the upper floor above a small haberdasher’s shop, such a shop as one felt could be kept only by a widow—a scanty display of poor feminine trifles in the window, children’s pinafores, cheap gloves, cheap artificial flowers, cheap finery of divers kinds, whose unsubstantial fabric a spring shower would reduce to mere pulp or rag useless even for the paper-mill.