"I was thinking of the music you made. It was so glad. I can't talk and say always what I think, like you do, but seems like it won't hurt me so here," she put her hand to her throat, "where it always hurts me when I am sorry at anything, if I can hear you glad in the music--like you were that--night I thought you were the 'Voices.'" "Cassandra, it shall be glad for you, always." She looked into his eyes an instant with the clear light of understanding in her own. "But for you? It is for you I want it to be glad." CHAPTER XIV IN WHICH DAVID VISITS THE BISHOP, AND FRALE SEES HIS ENEMY The bishop was seated in a deep canvas chair on his wide veranda, looking out over his garden toward a distant line of blue hills. His little wife sat close to his side on a low rocker, very busy with the making of buttonholes in a small girl's frock of white dimity and lace. Betty Towers loved lace and pretty things. The small girl was playing about the garden paths with her puppy and chattering with Frale in her high, happy, childish voice, while he bent weeding among the beds of okra and egg-plant. His face wore a more than usually discontented look, even when answering the child with teasing banter. Now and then he lifted his eyes from his work and watched furtively the movements of David Thryng, who was pacing restlessly up and down the long veranda in earnest conversation with the bishop and his wife. The two in the garden could not understand what was being said at the house, but each party could hear the voices of the other, and by calling out a little could easily converse across the dividing hedge and the intervening space. "Talk about the influence of the beautiful in nature upon the human soul,--it is all very pretty, but I believe the soul must be more or less enlightened to feel it. I've learned a few things among your people up there in the mountains. Strange beings they are." "It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning meditatively. "Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England." "Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and then, even if they have to come over here for it." "For that and--your money--yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain people of yours, who are they anyway?" "Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world--as any you will find at home. They have their heredity--and only that--from all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime." "How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"