He spoke a few words, hardly noticing that he was telling his memories; then the mask of his self-bound habit was resumed; then again the dignity of his sorrow found some expression; and still again he would retire into dumbness, setting the questioner aside slightingly; and when he had forgotten that he had drawn back within himself some further revealing would come from him.

It was little that he said in all, but language that has been fused in the furnace of so strong a sorrow and silence has little of the dross of common speech--the unmeaning, misleading, unnecessary elements: his veritable memory and thought and feeling were painted by his meagre tale.
Was that tale true?
John Bates would have thought it a great sin to deceive himself or another, and yet, such was the power of his love, blown to white heat by the breath of regret and purified, that when he spoke of the incidents of Sissy's childhood, of the cleverness she displayed when he taught her, of her growth until the day in which he had offended her by speaking of marriage, when he told of her tears, and prayers, and anger, and of his own despotism, the picture of it all that arose in Trenholme's imagination was exceedingly different from what would have been there had he seen the reality.

He would not have liked Cameron's daughter had he seen her, but, seeing her through the medium of a heart that loved her, all the reverence that is due to womanly sweetness stirred in him.

Cupid may be blind, but to the eyes of chastened love is given the vision of God.
When it appeared that Bates had said all that he was going to say, Alec Trenholme sat pondering the problem of this girl's disappearance with more mental energy than he had before given to it.

Knowing the place now, he knew that what Bates and Saul had averred was true--that there were but two ways by which any one could leave it while water was unfrozen, one by the boat, and the other by striking at random across the hill to the back of the farm--a route that could only lead either to one of several isolated farms, or, by a forty-mile tramp round by the nearest river bridge, to the railway.