He was a being calculated to inspire fear rather than love; but the fact that he had courted her presence and looked to her for consolation had touched Mary's heart, and she had become reconciled to all that was forbidding and disagreeable in the lunatic physiognomy.

Was he not the victim of a visitation which entitled him to respect as well as to pity?
For some days Mary held her peace, remembering Steadman's vehement entreaty that she should not speak of this subject to her grandmother.
She was silent, but the image of the old man haunted her at all times and seasons.

She saw him even in her dreams--those happy dreams of the girl who loves and is beloved, and before whom the pathway of the future smiles like a vision of Paradise.

She heard him calling to her with a piteous cry of distress, and on waking from this troubled dream she fancied that he must be dying, and that this sound in her dreams was one of those ghostly warnings which give notice of death.

She was so unhappy about him, altogether so distressed at being compelled to break her word, that she could not prevent her thoughts from dwelling upon him, not even after she had poured out all her trouble to John Hammond in a long letter, in which her garden adventures and her little skirmish with Steadman were graphically described.
To her intense discomforture Hammond replied that he thoroughly approved of Steadman's conduct in the matter.