She was able to be cheerful, for two months is a long time at seventeen, and the pain of her spirit was dulled: she had become used, though not reconciled, to the sight of a familiar figure, branded with shame. She no longer compared his every word and action with the truth she knew of him, for the beautiful green growth of custom was hiding the staring ugliness of her discovery. It was there, underneath, but now and then she was able to forget it, and that capacity almost persuaded her sometimes that her imagination had played her false. She watched him. He was the same man, it appeared, but for the shrinking wonder with which he looked at her, hurting her, striking doubt into her young criticism of things beyond her. Was it his guilt or her cold treatment which had cast this visible shadow over him? It should have been his guilt, but he had offended and yet gone clear of cloud before she found him out. It was her frowns that troubled him, and while she hated the immature self-righteousness which forced them from her, she could not keep them back; a smooth brow would have been disloyalty to the woman over whom he bent with a hypocrisy so perfect that it seemed impossible. She had hard work to restrain articulate scorn, but her curled lips did duty, exiling him to that desert place whence he could not see her smiles. In these days his shoulders became more bent, and Theresa learnt how he had looked in the shops where he was afraid of people's eyes. The knowledge shook her; he was like a frightened child who longs for kindness, and only by repeating those beating words could she forbear from putting her arms round his neck and kissing him under the brows. She longed to do it; her love fluttered and struggled in her breast, so that she had to quiet it with the pressure of her hand, and this was the beginning of a habit which never left her. She watched the postman, too. Letters, addressed in Alexander's writing, came from the farm among the hills: they were thick and sometimes sealed, and the eagerness with which her father took them to his room convinced her that they held enclosures. At such times he seemed to her like an animal secreting food, and the striving love lay still. On an evening when this had happened, she sat with her mother by the breakfast-room fire. It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows, and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it, strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles broke the white. She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down her sewing. "Such light, long evenings, and spring's news almost old. It makes me miserable." "I wish you would go out more, dear."