h go down the hillside and until she reached the main road.
Here, instead of going to the Red Mansion, she hesitated a moment, and
then passed along a wooded path leading to the Meetinghouse, and the
graveyard. It was a perfect day of early summer, the gorse was in full
bloom, and the may and the hawthorn were alive with colour. The path
she had taken led through a narrow lane, overhung with blossoms and
greenery. By bearing away to the left into another path, and making a
detour, she could reach the Meeting-house through a narrow lane leading
past a now disused mill and a small, strong stream flowing from the hill
above.

As she came down the hill, other eyes than Soolsby's watched her. From
his laboratory--the laboratory in which his father had worked, in which
he had lost his life--Eglington had seen the trim, graceful figure. He
watched it till it moved into the wooded path. Then he left his garden,
and, moving across a field, came into the path ahead of her. Walking
swiftly, he reached the old mill, and waited.

She came slowly, now and again stooping to pick a flower and place it in
her belt. Her bonnet was slung on her arm, her hair had broken a little
loose and made a sort of hood round the face, so still, so composed,
into which the light of steady, soft, apprehending eyes threw a gentle
radiance. It was a face to haunt a man when the storm of life was
round him. It had, too, a courage which might easily become a delicate
stubbornness, a sense of duty which might become sternness, if roused by
a sense of wrong to herself or others.

She reached the mill and stood and listened towards the stream and
the waterfall. She came here often. The scene quieted her in moods of
restlessness which came from a feeling that her mission was interrupted,
that half her life's work had been suddenly taken from her. When David
went, her life had seemed to shrivel; for with him she had developed as
he had developed; and when her busy care of him was withdrawn, she had
felt a sort of paralysis which, in a sense, had never left her. Then
suitors had come--the soldier from Shipley Wood, the lord of Axwood
Manor, and others, and, in a way, a new sense was born in her, though
she was alive to the fact that the fifteen thousand pounds inherited
from her Uncle Benn had served to warm the air about her into a wider
circle. Yet it was neither to soldier, nor squire, nor civil engineer,
nor surgeon that the new sense stirring in her was d