full, could change a gruesome village winter into
a season during which labour-stiffened and broken old things, closing
their cottage doors, could draw their chairs round the hearth and
hover luxuriously over the red glow, which in its comforting fashion of
seeming to have understanding of the dull dreams in old eyes, was more
to be loved than any human friend.

But she had not needed her passing speech with Marlow to stimulate
realisation of how much she had learned to care for the mere living
among these people, to whom she seemed to have begun to belong, and
whose comfortably lighting faces when they met her showed that they knew
her to be one who might be turned to in any hour of trouble or dismay.
The centuries which had trained them to depend upon their "betters" had
taught the slowest of them to judge with keen sight those who were to be
trusted, not alone as power and wealth holders, but as creatures humanly
upright and merciful with their kind.

"Workin' folk allus knows gentry," old Doby had once shrilled to her.
"Gentry's gentry, an' us knows 'em wheresoever they be. Better'n they
know theirselves. So us do!"

Yes, they knew. And though they accepted many things as being merely
their natural rights, they gave an unsentimental affection and
appreciation in return. The patriarchal note in the life was lovable to
her. Each creature she passed was a sort of friend who seemed almost of
her own blood. It had come to that. This particular existence was
more satisfying to her than any other, more heart-filling and warmly
complete.

"Though I am only an impostor," she thought; "I was born in Fifth
Avenue; yet since I have known this I shall be quite happy in no other
place than an English village, with a Norman church tower looking down
upon it and rows of little gardens with spears of white and blue lupins
and Canterbury bells standing guard before cottage doors."

And Rosalie--on the evening of that first strange day when she had
come upon her piteous figure among the heather under the trees near
the lake--Rosalie had held her arm with a hot little hand and had said
feverishly:

"If I could hear the roar of Broadway again! Do the stages rattle as
they used to, Betty? I can't help hoping that they do."

She carried her letter to the post and stopped to talk a few minutes
with the postmaster, who transacted his official business in a small
shop where sides of bacon and hams hung suspended from the ceiling,
w