played with her bread, ignoring her food otherwise, while she listened
with a bored air to the talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an
effect of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect; and when
St. John put up the window, and led the way out to the women in the
garden, and presented Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not
smile or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson's bow; she merely looked at
him with a sort of swift intensity, and then, when one of the women said,
"We were coming to view the scene of your burglarious exploit, Mr.
Hewson. Was that the very window?" the girl looked impatiently away.

"The very window," Hewson owned. "You wouldn't know it. St. John has had
the trellis put up and the spot fresh turfed," and he detached the
interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor host, as she
perhaps intended he should, and dropped back to the side of Miss
Hernshaw.

She was almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had
heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that
sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a virginal
youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the flower, while
the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the
fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She looked not above
sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the society sense of the
word, this must have been a moral effect; and Hewson was casting about in
his mind for some appropriate form of thought and language to make talk
in when she abruptly addressed him.

"I don't see," she said, with her face still away, "why people make fun
of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way."