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102 "Wait a moment," she said. "There is something else."

He paused as she bade him. A slight color rose to her cheek.

"When I spoke," she said, "I did not understand at all what had happened—not at all. I was stunned and angry. I thought that if I was too near you, you might have spoken instead of doing as you did." Then with studied coldness and meeting his gaze fully, "It would have been a vile thing to have said—if I had understood."

"Yes," he answered. "It would have been a vile thing, if you had understood; but you did not, and I realized that when I had time to think over it coolly."

"Then at first," she put it to him, "it made you angry?"

"Yes. I had run some risk, you know, and had had the luck to save your life."

The interview ended here, and it was some time before they met again.

But Murdoch heard of her often; so often indeed that she was kept pretty constantly before him. He heard of her from Haworth, from the Briarleys, from numberless sources indeed.

It became her caprice to make a kind of study of the people around her and to find entertainment in it. When she drove through the streets of the little town, past the workmen's cottages, and the Works themselves, she was stared at and commented upon. Her beauty, her dress, her manners roused the beholders either to lavish or grudging acknowledgment. Dirty children sometimes followed her carriage, and on its stopping at any point a small crowd gathered about it.