The girl looked from the men to the sky, and from the sky to the men.
“Well, you are a set of wise fellows,” she cried, “not to know the star which rules us all! And that’s not Venus, Doctor! Don’t any of you really know? Brand—you surely do? Well, I’ll tell you then, that’s Jupiter, that’s the lord-star Jupiter!”
And she burst into a peal of ringing boyish laughter. Brand turned to the Doctor, who had moved away to cast a final glance at the toad.
“What have you done to her, Fingal?” he called out. “She hasn’t laughed like that for years.”
The only answer he received to this was an embarrassed cough, but when they returned to the library and began looking at some of the more interesting of the volumes in its shelves it was noticed by both Brand and Mr. Traherne that the Doctor treated the young girl with a frank, direct, simple and humorous friendliness as if completely oblivious of her sex.
XX
RAVELSTON GRANGE
The hot weather continued with the intermission of only a few wet and windy days all through the harvest. One Saturday afternoon Sorio, who had arranged to take Nance by train to Mundham, loitered with Baltazar at the head of the High Street waiting the girl’s appearance. She had told him to meet her there rather than at her lodging because since the occasion when they took refuge in the cottage it had been agitating to her to see Linda and Baltazar together. She knew without any question asked that for several weeks her sister had seen nothing of Brand and she was extremely unwilling, now that the one danger seemed removed, that the child should risk falling into another.
Nance herself had lately been seeing more of her friend’s friend than she liked. It was difficult to avoid this, however, now that they lived so near, especially as Mr. Stork’s leisure times between his journeys to Mundham, coincided so exactly with her own hours of freedom from work at the dressmaker’s. But the more she saw of Baltazar, the more difficult she found it to tolerate him. With Brand, whenever chance threw him across her path, she was always able to preserve a dignified and conventional reserve. She saw that he knew how deep her indignation on behalf of her sister went and she could not help respecting him for the tact and discretion with which he accepted her tacit antagonism and made any embarrassing clash between them easy to avoid. At the bottom of her heart she had never felt any personal dislike of Brand Renshaw, nor did that peculiar fear which he seemed to inspire in the majority of those who knew him affect her in the least. She would have experienced not the slightest trepidation in confronting him on her sister’s behalf if circumstances demanded it and meanwhile she only asked that they should be left in peace.