He meant to leave her as she was; to accept the adoration of the child, but to attempt no awakening of the woman.

The girl was of the mountains, and their higher, colder, purer air; though he had brought her body thence, he would not have her spirit leave the climbing earth, the dreamlike summits, for the hot and dusty plain.

The plain, God knew, had dwellers enough.
She was a thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment in a dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child.

About her was a pathos, too,--the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not.

Haward, looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity so real and great that for the moment his heart ached as for some sorrow of his own.