Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, of a somewhat cold temper, he had never, for all his imaginative sentiment towards his little friend, been at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction. But the idea of such attraction having seized so strongly upon another person reacted upon him, and he looked at her, perhaps for the first time since they had met, with eyes of something more than purely sentimental regard. This new element in his attitude towards her did not, however, issue in any excess of physical jealousy. What it did lead to, unluckily for Lacrima, was a certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for her personality. In place of focussing his attention upon the sublime sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the events she narrated concentrated his mind upon the mere brutal and accidental fact that Mr. Goring had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of her having been so desired by such a man, changed her in his eyes. His cynical distrust of all women led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque idea that she must in her heart be gratified by having aroused this passion in the farmer. It did not carry him quite so far as to make him believe that she had consciously excited such emotion; but it led him to the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had Lacrima come to him with a shame-faced confession that she had let herself be seduced by the Priory-tenant he could hardly have gazed at her with more changed and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious mixture of sorrowful pity and remote unlawful attraction to the object of his pity, that he would have felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child of the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring’s passion, she became for him no less than such an unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had hitherto cherished changing into quite a different mood. He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her closely to him, kissing her again and again. The girl’s heart went on anxiously beating. She could hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. Why did he not speak? Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick feminine instinct that something was wrong, she pulled him down upon the bench by her side and taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful bewilderment into his face. “So when this thing happens,” she said, “all your troubles will be over. You will be free forever from that horrid office.” “And you,” said Mr. Quincunx--his mood changing again, and his goblin-like smile twitching his nostrils,--“You will be the mistress of the Priory. Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether when that happens!” So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford to turn the thing into a jest--into God knows what! She let his hand drop and stared into empty space, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing.