"Who says--?"
"Peter Lars for one; besides, I have only to open my eyes and see."
"You don't say so?"
"That is, to be candid, I never opened them till yesterday, when Peter Lars was talking of it, and said he would give a great deal to have seen you as you were when you first came, ten years ago. And then it only just occurred to me that I had been struck with you at the time. Since then, I never thought about it. I hardly knew whether you were plain or pretty. You were my own little mother, and that was all I cared for. But I see that Peter Lars, though I can't abide him, spoke truth when he said--"
"When he said, I had once been handsome?--thank you!"
Walter reddened. "Nay, you must not take it that way; for I think, on the contrary, yours is a face that could not alter much in half a lifetime."
"Possibly," she answered quietly: "By rights, a face that has never been young, should never grow old, unless the hair turns grey." A silence followed, while the little flame under the tea-kettle suddenly went out, and hushed that too. At last the girl resumed. "Yet I wrong myself; I was as young once as the youngest--happiest--most careless. If I changed so soon it was not my fault."
"Whose then?" he said, very softly, holding his breath to listen; and as his head rested on her knee, he felt how she shivered through all her limbs at the recollection.
"Whose fault was it?" he whispered, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling--on a spot where a tiny ring of light was flickering above the cylinder of the little lamp.
"It is not a long story," she said reluctantly; "but a story that is neither new nor pretty: and so why should I tell it you? If you had been a daughter, instead of being a son, I should not have let you grow up to be nineteen, without having told it. It might not have done much good, what stories ever did? But at least, I should have done my duty by her, as a mother. But you that are a man, what good could I have done, by telling you that man is a rapacious and a selfish animal. If your own conscience has not taught you that, sooner or later it will."