However, just as he was turning, his attention was caught by something that was passing on the opposite hillside. The light from the west was shining full on a white cottage with a sloping garden. The cottage belonged to the Wesleyan minister of the place, and had been rented by Burrows for the last six months. And just as George was turning away he saw Burrows come out of the door with a burden--a child, or a woman little larger than a child--in his arms. He carried her to an armchair which had been placed on the little grass-plat. The figure was almost lost in the chair, and sat motionless while Burrows brought cushions and a stool. Then a baby came to play on the grass, and Burrows hung over the back of the chair, bending so as to talk to the person in it. "Dying?" said George to himself. "Poor devil! he must hate something." * * * * * He sped up the hill, and found Letty still on the sofa and in the last pages of her novel. She did not resent his absence apparently,--a freedom, so far, from small exaction for which he inwardly thanked her. Still, from the moment that she raised her eyes as he came in, he saw that if she was not angry with him for leaving her alone, her mind was still as sore as ever against him and fortune on other accounts--and his revived ardour drooped. He gave her an account of his adventures, but she was neither inquiring nor sympathetic; and her manner all the evening had a nervous dryness that took away the pleasure of their _tete-a-tete._ Any old friend of Letty's, indeed, could hardly have failed to ask what had become of that small tinkling charm of manner, that girlish flippancy and repartee, that had counted for so much in George's first impressions of her? They were no sooner engaged than it had begun to wane. Was it like the bird or the flower, that adorns itself only for the wooing time, and sinks into relative dinginess when the mating effort is over? On this particular evening, indeed, she was really absorbed half the time in gloomy thoughts of Lady Tressady's behaviour and the poorness of her own prospects. She lay on the sofa again after dinner--her white slimness and bright hair showing delicately against the cushions--playing still with her novel, while George read the newspapers. Sometimes she glanced at him unsteadily, with a pinching of the lips. But it was not her way to invite a scene. Late at night he went up to his dressing-room.