not to reveal fully
till later on, and thus to hint too that it was not as one of the
number of her defilers that I had sought her.

"Why," she said, "how do you know the colour of my hair? We have never
met before."

"Yes, we have," I said, "and that was why I spoke to you to-night.
I'll tell you where it was another time."

But after all I could not desist from telling her that night, for, as
afterwards at her lodging we sat over the fire, talking as if we had
known each other all our lives, there seemed no reason for an arbitrary
delay.

I described to her the solitary moorland road, and the grey-gowned
woman's figure in front of me, and the gig coming along to meet her,
and the salutation of the two girls, and I told her all one look of her
face had meant for me, and how I had wildly sought her in vain, and
from that day to this had held her image in my heart.

And as I told her, she sobbed with her head against my knees and her
great hair filling my lap with gold. In broken words she drew for me
the other side of the picture of that long-past summer day.

Yes, the girl in the gig was her sister, and they were the only
daughters of a farmer who had been rich once, but had come to ruin by
drink and misfortune. They had been brought up from girls by an old
grandmother, with whom the sister was living at the time of my seeing
them. Yes, Tom was her husband. He was a doctor in the neighbourhood
when he married her, and a man, I surmised, of some parts and promise,
but, moving to town, he had fallen into loose ways, taken to drinking
and gambling, and had finally deserted her for another woman--at the
very moment when their first child was born. The child died "Thank
God!" she added with sudden vehemence, and "I--well, you will wonder
how I came to this, I wonder myself--it has all happened but six months
ago, and yet I seem to have forgotten--only the broken-hearted and the
hungry would understand, if I could remember--and yet it was not life,
certainly not life I wanted--and yet I couldn't die--"

The more I came to know Elizabeth and realise the rare delicacy of her
nature, the simplicity of her mind, and the purity of her soul, the
less was I able to comprehend the psychology of that false step which
her great misery had forced her to take. For hers was not a sensual,
pleasure-loving nature. In fact, there was a certain curious
Puritanism about her, a Puritanism which found a startlingly
incongruous