; perhaps
I didn't; but in any case it was some satisfaction to have made the
attempt.

Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the village
tales--the old unhappy things, for they were mostly old and always
unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen. It was her eyes that did it.
At times they had an intensity in their gaze which made them almost
uncanny, something like the luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on
its prey. They held me, though not because they glittered: I could have
gone away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only because
the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green eyes, which came
into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned on my careless mind.

She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather
strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face
well shaped, with fine acquiline features. No doubt it had been a very
handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and
firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though
we have but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us like
a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a singular and
powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a
Wiltshire village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity. With
her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom
an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into
marble. But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was patient and
cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and--a strange thing
this to record of an old woman in a village!--she would never speak of
her ailments. But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and
active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young
girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life
in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren
dead or grown up and scattered about the earth.

Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal
listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go on listening
for ever. That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in
her eyes; it was because she