thing with. Ourselves—our real selves—you can't touch."
"Is that so?" said Crispin. "But I have not begun. The fun is all to come. We will see whether I can touch you or no. And for my daughter-in-law"—he looked at Hesther—"there is plenty of time—many years perhaps."
Nothing in all his life would ever appeal more to Harkness than Hesther then. From the first moment of his sight of her what had attracted him had been the exquisite mingling of the child and of the woman. She had been for him at first some sort of deserted waif who had experienced all the cruelty and harshness of life so desperately early that she had known life upside down, and this had given her a woman's endurance and fortitude. She was like a child who has dressed up in her mother's clothes for a party and then finds that she must take her mother's place.
And now when she must, after this terrible night, be physically beyond all her resources she seemed, in her shabby ill-made dress, her hair disordered, her face pale, her eyes ringed with grey, to have a new courage that must be similar to that which he had himself been given. She kept her hand in Dunbar's, and with a strange dim unexpected pain Harkness realised that that new relation between the two of which he had made the foundation had grown through danger and anxiety the one for
