Chapter 2 - Page 2

seem to wear away its individuality; but
in the still water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and
sentiment shoots out in visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as
readily as a child's look by an intruder. In years she was no
more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought
at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of
her childhood's face to a premature finality. Thus she had but
little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent particular--her
hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its color was,
roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but
careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that
its true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.

On this one bright gift of Time to the particular victim of his
now before us the new-comer's eyes were fixed; meanwhile the
fingers of his right hand mechanically played over something
sticking up from his waistcoat-pocket--the bows of a pair of
scissors, whose polish made them feebly responsive to the light
within. In her present beholder's mind the scene formed by the
girlish spar-maker composed itself into a post-Raffaelite picture
of extremest quality, wherein the girl's hair alone, as the focus
of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, and
her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred
mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.

He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. The
young woman turned at the crunch of his boots on the sanded floor,
and exclaiming, "Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!" quite
lost her color for a moment.

He replied, "You should shut your door--then you'd hear folk open
it."

"I can't," she said; "the chimney smokes so. Mr. Percombe, you
look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge.
Surely you have not come out here on my account--for--"

"Yes--to have your answer about this." He touched her head with
his cane, and she winced. "Do you agree?" he continued. "It is
necessary that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going
away, and it takes time to make up."

"Don't press me--it worries me. I was in hopes you had thought no
more of it. I can NOT part with it--so there!"

"Now, look here, Marty," said the barber, sitting down on the
coffin-stool table. "How much do you get for making these spars?"

"Hush--father's up-stairs awake, and he don't know that I am doing
his work."

"Well, now tell me," said the man, more softly. "How much do you
get?"

"Eighteenpence a thousand," she said, reluctantly.

"Who are you making them for?"

"Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just