A little before dusk, Noke’s daughter went home from Glatting Wood feeling highly satisfied with her day’s work. She had lived so long in the shadow of her parents and their unremitting industry that this new life, the life of personal conquest, was exhilarating beyond anything she had ever dreamed. She was intoxicated with a sudden sense of her own beauty and power, and scornful of those dullards at home who had never noticed this queen moving among them. Others had lightly flattered her, and some had gone further than flattery; but it had been left to Seth Shellett to awaken, and in the same moment fulfil, the woman in her, the wolf of hunger and the lion of pride. Hugh Marden had been well enough in his way, and at first she had thought him wonderful. A gentleman, the Squire’s own son, with elegant manners and a flow of fine talk, he at least provided a very pretty feather for her cap. But, after all, he was little more than a boy, younger than herself by years. Moreover he was only amusing himself: a girl who had sharpened her wits against Harry Noke’s could not fail to see that this young gentleman would never lose his heart to her, however ardently, in fits and starts of enthusiasm, he might court her favours. She had indeed learned much from Master Hugh and her pride had suffered not a little at his hands. The growing realization that he held her cheap, something between a passion and a plaything, had filled her with dismay, with resentment, and finally with a lust to find someone who would admire her as much as she admired herself. And now she had Seth and was enchanted with him: with his strength, his taciturnity, his unexpectedness: and above all with the woman she saw in his eyes. For, however much he might be lacking in the airs and graces of gentility, he was (she vowed) a man to make two of Master Hugh, with whom, moreover, she always felt inferior. Seth was slow and sudden and surprising. His tongue-tied sheepish pleasure in her and his dullness of mind, and then the sudden masterful desire that could make a god of him: these, by their contrast and alternation, kept her in a continual delight and terror. By his silences, and by his rough impetuous handling of her, he told her what she wished to be told with an eloquence that Master Hugh, with his half-playful audacities of speech, could never hope to command. The worship in his face enraptured her; his flame of animal exultation shone out upon her and burned her hunger away. And if he was so different from Master Hugh, he was more different still from her dour industrious brothers. That he was perhaps himself ‘a sort of brother’—for Harry Noke made no secret of having begotten him—made this differentness of his all the more enticing. The relationship, or its possibility, did not dismay or deter her, except when she thought of her father, of whom she had good reason to be afraid. A month ago, Seth Shellett had been a stranger to her; now he was a lover. He had never been a brother, and she could not regard him as a brother now. The tale her father told of him was probably no more than a trick for making her mother angry, a mere parcel of lies; and, if not, tis no consarn of mine, thought Charity.