e hope that he might one day hear her story from
her own lips. In his simplicity it did not strike him that he himself had
grown to be an object of interest to her.

Somehow, during the summer and autumn of that year, Mrs. Goddard
contracted a habit of watching the park gate from the window of the
cottage, particularly at certain hours of the day. It was only a habit,
but it seemed to amuse her. She used to sit in the small bay window with
her books, reading to herself or teaching Nellie, and it was quite
natural that from time to time she should look out across the road. But
it rarely happened, when she was installed in that particular place, that
Mr. Juxon failed to appear at the gate, with his dog Stamboul, his green
stockings, his stick and the inevitable rose in his coat. Moreover he
generally crossed the road and, if he did not enter the cottage and spend
a quarter of an hour in conversation, he at least spoke to Mrs. Goddard
through the open window. It was remarkable, too, that as time went on
what at first had seemed the result of chance, recurred with such
invariable regularity as to betray the existence of a fixed rule. Nellie,
too, who was an observant child, had ceased asking questions but watched
her mother with her great violet eyes in a way that made Mrs. Goddard
nervous. Nellie liked the squire very much but though she asked her
mother very often at first whether she, too, was fond of that nice Mr.
Juxon, the answers she received were not encouraging. How was it
possible, Mrs. Goddard asked, to speak of liking anybody one had known so
short a time? And as Nellie was quite unable to answer such an inquiry,
she desisted from her questions and applied herself to the method of
personal observation. But here, too, she was met by a hopeless
difficulty. The squire and her mother never seemed to have any secrets,
as Nellie would have expressed it. They met daily, and daily exchanged
very much the same remarks concerning the weather, the garden, the
vicar's last sermon. When they talked about anything else, they spoke of
books, of which the squire lent Mrs. Goddard a great number. But this was
a subject which did not interest Nellie very much; she was not by any
means a prodigy in the way of learning, and though she was now nearly
eleven years old was only just beginning to read the Waverley novels. On
one occasion she remarked to her mother that she did not believe a word
of them and did not think they were a bit