back at her from its shining surface, with brimming eyes and
quivering lips, and hair all tossed loosely away from a small sad
face as pale as a watery moon, and she drew back from her own
reflection with a gesture of repugnance.

"I am no use to anybody in any way," she said, despairingly--"I am
not even good-looking. And Robin--poor foolish Robin!--called me
'lovely' this afternoon! He has no eyes!"

Then a sudden thought flew across her brain of Ned Landon. The
tall powerful-looking brute loved her, she knew. Every look of his
told her that his very soul pursued her with a reckless and
relentless passion. She hated him,--she trembled even now as she
pictured his dark face and burning eyes;--he had annoyed and
worried her in a thousand ways--ways that were not sufficiently
open in their offence to be openly complained of, though had
Farmer Jocelyn's state of health given her less cause for anxiety
she might have said something to him which would perhaps have
opened his eyes to the situation. But not now,--not now could she
appeal to anyone for protection from amorous insult. For who was
she--what was she that she should resent it? She was nothing!--a
mere stray child whose parents nobody knew,--without any lawful
guardian to uphold her rights or assert her position. No wonder
old Jocelyn had called her "wilding"--she was indeed a "wilding"
or weed,--growing up unwanted in the garden of the world, destined
to be pulled out of the soil where she had nourished and thrown
contemptuously aside. A wretched sense of utter helplessness stole
over her,--of incapacity, weakness and loneliness. She tried to
think,--to see her way through the strange fog of untoward
circumstance that had so suddenly enshrouded her. What would