A girl seated on an oak stool, in the shadow of the settle, raised her quiet eyes, and watched him while he spoke. She was a slim, frail thing, with hair parted in the centre and coiled flatly round her head. She had taken the lowest seat, and had drawn it into the shadow, but now she leaned forward, and the firelight searched her face. She was not beautiful, she was not even pretty, she was small and insignificant, she had made no effort to join in the conversation, and now, as John Malham finished speaking, she shrank back into her corner, and became once more a frail, shadowy shape; nevertheless, a beholder who had been vouchsafed that one glimpse would have found himself turning once and again to that shaded corner. He would have wanted to see that girl again; he would have been conscious of a strange attraction towards her; he would have asked himself curiously was it liking, or--hate? The girl said nothing, but a man by her side punctuated the pause by a laugh. He was a handsome fellow, with a bright, quizzical face and a pair of audacious blue eyes. "Oh, be hanged to fortune!" he cried loudly. "Be hanged to flagged paths! They're the deepest ruts of all, if you could but see it. What's wrong with us all is lethargy, slackness, the inability to move of our own accord. What we get matters nothing, it's the _getting_ that counts! Why, when I think of the whole wide world lying open, waiting, beckoning, and of fellows like myself pacing every day of our lives in a square mile cage in the City, I--I--" (he snapped his fingers in a frenzy of impatience) "I wonder how long I can carry my chains! They'll snap some day, and I'll be off, and it will be a long good-bye to the civilised world." The girl in the blue dress looked at him with wistful eyes, but she laughed more gaily than ever, and cried: "Wait, please, till after the dance on the tenth, and when you _do_ go, send home things to us, won't you? Shawls and cashmeres, and embroideries. And pearls! I've always longed to know a real live pearl-fisher. He ought to remember us, oughtn't he, everybody--because we've been so kind and patient with his vagaries? We all deserve something, but bags Me the pearls!" "Oh, you shall have your pearls right enough," said the handsome man, but there was a careless tone in his voice which made the promise seem worthless as sand, and he never glanced in the direction of the girl in the blue dress. Pretty, wistful little Norah Boyce looked up quickly as if she were about to speak; thought better of it, and turned back to stare into the fire. The girl seated on the oak stool leaned forward once again, and looked straight into the face of the handsome man. One white hand rested against her throat, a slim column of a throat, bare of ornament. Her fingers moved as though in imagination they were fingering a rope of pearls.