"It serves me right," he concluded.
The most hopeless of humours assailed him, and he yielded to it without a struggle. His attitude expressed his mood with relentless verity. Chin sunken upon his breast, eyes fairly distilling gloom, legs stretched out carelessly before him, he sat motionless, suffocating at the bottom of a gulf of discontent. His lips moved, sometimes noiselessly, again in whispers barely audible.
"Years of this!... A matter of human endurance—no, superhuman!... If it wasn't for the bargain, I'd chuck it all and...
"Well, the only way to forget your misery is to work, I suppose."
He pulled himself together and stood up, wondering where he had left his broom, and simultaneously stiffened with surprise, aware that he was not alone. A glance, however, established the connection between the rear door, which stood ajar, and the young woman who stood staring at him in utterest stupefaction. This, he thought, must be the woman of the voice, upstairs.
But she couldn't be Graham's wife. She was too young. Even beneath the mask of care and weariness, the all too plain evidences of privation, spiritual and mental as well as physical, that Betty wore unceasingly in those days, he could discern youth and grace and gentleness, and the nascent promise of prettiness that longed to be, to have the chance to show itself and claim its meed of deference and love. He was quick to see the intelligence in her mutinous eyes, and the sweet lines of her mouth, too often shaped in sullen mould, and no less quick to recognise that she would carry herself well, with spirit and dignity, once she were relieved of household toil and moil, once given the chance to discard her shapeless, bedraggled and threadbare garments for those dainty and beautiful things for which her starved heart must be sick with longing....
"Good Lord!" he thought, pitiful, "it's worse here than I dreamed. Old Graham must need a keeper—and this child has been trying to be that, with nothing to keep him on."
"Who are you?" the girl demanded sullenly, in a voice a little harsh and toneless. "What are you doing here? Where's my father?"
"Mr. Graham has stepped out on business," Duncan replied. "You are his daughter, I believe?"
"Yes, I'm his daughter, but——"