"Where did you go ?" Alec had asked him fiercely, almost suspecting, from his abject looks, that he had seen the girl.

He could, however, learn nothing but that the invalid had walked "down the road and rested a while and come back." Nothing important had happened, Alec thought; and yet this conclusion was not true.
That which had happened had been this.

John Bates, after lying for a week trying to devise some cunning plan for seeing Sissy without compromising her, and having failed in this, rose up in the sudden energy of a climax of impatience, and, by dint of short stages and many rests by the roadside, found his way through the town, up the steps of the hotel, and into its bar-room.

No one could hinder him from going there, thought he, and perchance he might see the lassie.
Years of solitude, his great trouble, and, lastly, the complaint which rendered him so obviously feeble, had engendered in his heart a shyness that made it terrible to him to go alone across the hotel verandah, where men and women were idling.

In truth, though he was obviously ill, the people noticed him much less than he supposed, for strangers often came there; but egotism is a knife which shyness uses to wound itself with.