She is, in a sense, a friend of mine." "Don't say she is a _friend_ of yours--_don't!_" he said, with almost disgust in his tone.
They had halted in the lane just outside the yard gate, and now he put down the pail and turned his back on the still shut gate to speak with more freedom.

As he talked, the brisk air dashed about the boughs of the spindling lilac hedge, shaking slant sunbeams upon the unpainted gate and upon the young man and woman in front of it.
Then, but in a way that was graphic because of strong feeling, Alec Trenholme told the more real part of the story which he had outlined the night before; told of the melancholy solitude in which Bates had been left with the helpless old woman in a house that was bewitched in the eyes of all, so that no servant or labourer would come near it.

In talk that was a loose mosaic of detail and generalisation, he told of the woman's work to which the proud Scotchman had been reduced in care of the aunt who in his infancy had cared for him, and how he strove to keep the house tidy for her because she fretted when she saw housework ill-done.

He explained that Bates would have been reduced to hard straits for want of the yearly income from his lumber had not he himself "chanced" to go and help him.

He said that Bates had gone through all this without complaint, without even counting it hard, because of the grief he counted so much worse--the loss of the girl, and the belief that she had perished because of his unkindness.
"For he _loved_ her, Miss Rexford.