For a few moments her face brooded over the bush, and her long, finely-modelled fingers travelled about it as if they were creating a flower upon it--probably they were assisting the birth or blowing of some beauty--and then she raised herself with a lingering look, and vanished from the field of the window.
But ever after this, when the evening grew dark, Robert would steal out of the house, leaving his book open by his grannie's lamp, that its patient expansion might seem to say, 'He will come back presently,' and dart round the corner with quick quiet step, to hear if Miss St.John was playing.

If she was not, he would return to the Sabbath stillness of the parlour, where his grandmother sat meditating or reading, and Shargar sat brooding over the freedom of the old days ere Mrs.Falconer had begun to reclaim him.

There he would seat himself once more at his book--to rise again ere another hour had gone by, and hearken yet again at her window whether the stream might not be flowing now.

If he found her at her instrument he would stand listening in earnest delight, until the fear of being missed drove him in: this secret too might be discovered, and this enchantress too sent, by the decree of his grandmother, into the limbo of vanities.

Thus strangely did his evening life oscillate between the two peaceful negations of grannie's parlour and the vital gladness of the unknown lady's window.