My God, how he had looked at her only that night! And it was in that pearl of moments that she had thrust his past back upon him and bade him, with her precious, new-found power, read the letter that should never have been opened. The perfect rose had been within her grasp. It was her own hand that had flung it in the dust. Master Simon, still shaking his head and muttering disapproval, went slowly back to his laboratory. “The cunning jade!” he was grumbling, “she’s no more ill than I am. Or if she be, a pretty business we shall have with her—a fine lady with vapours, and megrims, and tantrums! I’ve not forgotten the ways of them...!” But here an illuminating idea flashed upon his brain. He stopped at the corner of a passage, cocking his head like an old grey jackdaw. “Eh, but a fine lady in her tantrums.... What a test for the virtues of my paragon herb!” All very well to rejoice at its efficacy upon the homely rustic. Master Simon had experimented upon the homely rustic too many years not to have developed a fine contempt for his vile corpus; he was too true an enthusiast not to long for something like a proper nervous system upon which to work. An air of returning good humour now settled upon his face; and by the time he was seated at his table, he had begun to wish his unwelcome cousin really a prey to the most advanced melancholia, and was conning over what phrases he could remember of her letter—delighted when they seemed to point to that conclusion. “And even if she be not pining away for sorrow, as she would like poor David to believe, if I remember the lady aright, she has as disordered a temper of her own as John Cantrip himself.” CHAPTER VII NODS AND WREATHÉD SMILES ... Half light, half shade, She stood, a sight to make an old man young. —TENNYSON (_Gardener’s Daughter_). Within Bindon house the next ten days were as uneventful as those that had preceded this night of emotional trouble; days similar in routine, in outward tranquillity. But how unlike in colour, in atmosphere! It was as if thunder-clouds had chased all the summer peace; as if brooding skies had taken the place of radiance and laughing blue; as if close mists enshrouded the earth, robbing the woods of living light and shade, dulling the tints of flower and turf, contracting the horizon. The former days had been days of many-hued hope; these now were days of drab suspense. And ever and anon, in the listening stillness, there came upon Ellinor’s inner senses, as from behind hiding hills, the far-off mutter of a gathering storm.