inhabitants of the houses before which he would abruptly pull up their
horse and open his sketch-book, she slipped away to some spot from
which, without being seen, she could watch him at work, or at least look
down on the house he was drawing. She had not been displeased, at first,
to have it known to North Dormer and the neighborhood that she was
driving Miss Hatchard's cousin about the country in the buggy he had
hired of lawyer Royall. She had always kept to herself, contemptuously
aloof from village love-making, without exactly knowing whether her
fierce pride was due to the sense of her tainted origin, or whether she
was reserving herself for a more brilliant fate. Sometimes she envied
the other girls their sentimental preoccupations, their long hours of
inarticulate philandering with one of the few youths who still lingered
in the village; but when she pictured herself curling her hair or
putting a new ribbon on her hat for Ben Fry or one of the Sollas boys
the fever dropped and she relapsed into indifference.

Now she knew the meaning of her disdains and reluctances. She had
learned what she was worth when Lucius Harney, looking at her for the
first time, had lost the thread of his speech, and leaned reddening on
the edge of her desk. But another kind of shyness had been born in
her: a terror of exposing to vulgar perils the sacred treasure of her
happiness. She was not sorry to have the neighbors suspect her of "going
with" a young man from the city; but she did not want it known to all
the countryside how many hours of the long June days she spent with him.
What she most feared was that the inevitable comments should reach Mr.
Royall. Charity was instinctively aware that few things concerning her
escaped the eyes of the silent man under whose roof she lived; and in
spite of the latitude which North Dormer accorded to courting couples
she had always felt that, on the day when she showed too open a
preference, Mr. Royall might, as she phrased it, make her "pay for