d it up first."

Together therefore they washed and bound up the cut. Having finished,
she looked at Miltoun, and seemed to say: "You would do the telling so
much better than I."

He, therefore, told the mother and was rewarded by a little smile from
the grave lady.

From that meeting he took away the knowledge of her name, Audrey Lees
Noel, and the remembrance of a face, whose beauty, under a cap of
squirrel's fur, pursued him. Some days later passing by the village
green, he saw her entering a garden gate. On this occasion he had asked
her whether she would like her cottage re-thatched; an inspection of the
roof had followed; he had stayed talking a long time. Accustomed to
women--over the best of whom, for all their grace and lack of
affectation, high-caste life had wrapped the manner which seems to take
all things for granted--there was a peculiar charm for Miltoun in this
soft, dark-eyed lady who evidently lived quite out of the world, and had
so poignant, and shy, a flavour. Thus from a chance seed had blossomed
swiftly one of those rare friendships between lonely people, which can in
short time fill great spaces of two lives.

One day she asked him: "You know about me, I suppose?" Miltoun made a
motion of his head, signifying that he did. His informant had been the
vicar.

"Yes, I am told, her story is a sad one--a divorce."

"Do you mean that she has been divorced, or----"

For the fraction of a second the vicar perhaps had hesitated.

"Oh! no--no. Sinned against, I am sure. A nice woman, so far as I have
seen; though I'm afraid not one of my congregation."

With this, Miltoun, in whom chivalry had already been awakened, was
content. When she asked if he knew her story, he would not for the world
have had her rake up what was painful. Whatever that story, she could
not have been to blame. She had begun already to be shaped by his own
spirit; had become not a human being as it was, but an expression of his
aspiration....

On the third evening after his passage of arms with Courtier, he was
again at her little white cottage sheltering within its high garden
walls. Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging the
old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of hiding
from the world. Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees spread their
dark boughs over the outhouses, and in any south-west wind could be heard
speaking gravely about the weather. Tall lila