Thus the pride, which is of man, mingled with the love, which is of God, and polluted it.

From that hour he began to lord it over the girl; and this change in his behavior immediately reacted on himself, in the obscure perception that there might be danger to her in continued freedom of intercourse: he must, therefore, he concluded, order the way for both; he must take care of her as well as of himself.

But was it consistent with this resolve that he should, for a whole month, spend every leisure moment in working at a present for her--a written marvel of neatness and legibility?
Again, by this meeting askance, as it were, another disintegrating force was called into operation: the moment Letty knew she could not tell Godfrey, and that therefore a wall had arisen between him and her, that moment woke in her the desire, as she had never felt it before, to see Tom Helmer.

She could no longer bear to be shut up in herself; she must see somebody, get near to somebody, talk to somebody; her secret would choke her otherwise, would swell and break her heart; and who was there to think of but Tom--and Mary Marston?
She had never once gone to the oak again, but she had not altogether avoided a certain little cobwebbed gable-window in the garret, from which it was visible; neither had she withheld her hands from cleaning a pane in that window, that through it she might see the oak; and there, more than once or twice, now thickening the huge limb, now spotting the grass beneath it, she had descried a dark object, which could be nothing else than Tom Helmer on the watch for herself.

He must surely be her friend, she reasoned, or how would he care, day after day, to climb a tree to look if she were coming--she who was the veriest nobody in all other eyes but his?
It was so good of Tom! She _would_ call him Tom; everybody else called him Tom, and why shouldn't she--to herself, when nobody was near?
As to Mary Marston, she treated her like a child! When she told her that she had met Tom at Durnmelling, and how kind he had been, she looked as grave as if it had been wicked to be civil to him; and told her in return how he and his mother were always quarreling: that must be his mother's fault, she was sure-it could not be Tom's; any one might see that at a glance! His mother must be something like her aunt! But, after that, how could she tell Mary any more?
It would not be fair to Tom, for, like the rest, she would certainly begin to abuse him.