“I noticed her at breakfast,” Hewson answered, now first aware of having been struck with the strange beauty and strange behavior of the slim girl, who drooped in her chair, with her little head fallen forward, and played with her bread, ignoring her food otherwise, while she listened with a bored air to the talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an effect of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect; and when St. John put up the window, and led the way out to the women in the garden, and presented Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not smile or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson’s bow; she merely looked at him with a sort of swift intensity, and then, when one of the women said, “We were coming to view the scene of your burglarious exploit, Mr. Hewson. Was that the very window?” the girl looked impatiently away. “The very window,” Hewson owned. “You wouldn’t know it. St. John has had the trellis put up and the spot fresh turfed,” and he detached the interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor host, as she perhaps intended he should, and dropped back to the side of Miss Hernshaw. She was almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a virginal youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the flower, while the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She looked not above sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the society sense of the word, this must have been a moral effect; and Hewson was casting about in his mind for some appropriate form of thought and language to make talk in when she abruptly addressed him. “I don’t see,” she said, with her face still away, “why people make fun of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way.” Hewson silently picked his steps back through the intervening events to the drolling at breakfast, and with some misgiving took his stand in the declaration, “You mean the waitress at the inn?” “Yes!” cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, which was so dear to the young man that he would have given anything to believe that it veiled a measure of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress. “We went in there last night when we arrived, for some pins--Mrs. Rock had had her dress stepped on, getting out of the car--and that girl brought them. I never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice; she had no more manners than a cow.” Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it followed, and in his poor masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, “Yes, there’s a whole tragedy in it. I wonder if it’s potential or actual.” He somehow felt safe in being so metaphysical.