s hand; but natural good-breeding forced her to acquiesce.

The ladies looked back at her, waved their hands by the garden gate,
and went away talking.

"The child never said 'Thank you.' Badly reared."

"But the mother thanked you. I liked her face. She must have been
distinctly good-looking."

The artists thought her distinctly good-looking even now, and perhaps,
after being repulsed in their quest for bed and board, drifted off
into an idle dream of how they might have met her a few years ago when
they were less famous but more magnetically attractive. What a sitter
she would have been for them, if she wouldn't be anything else! They
admired the extreme delicacy of her nose that seemed so narrow in the
well-rounded face, the loose brown hair that showed such a red flash
in it beneath her sunbonnet, the perfect modeling of full forearms,
firm neck, and ample bosom, the whole poise of her graciously solid
figure, at once so reposeful and so free. But it was the eyes
principally that set them dreaming of vanished youth, abandoned hopes,
and lost opportunities. Nowadays Mavis could meet the unduly
interested regard of male investigators with a candid unvacillating
outlook; there came no hint of feebleness in resistance, too ready
submission, or temperamental proneness to surrender; but her eyes,
whether she wished it or not, still served as messengers between all
that was feminine in her and all that was masculine outside her; and,
with no reason not to tell the truth, they told it boldly, seeming to
say, "Yes, once I had much to give, and I gave every single bit of it
to one man. I have nothing left now for cadgers, sneak-thieves, and
other outsiders."

She was a woman steadily completing her cycle. In fact, with her added
weight, broadened contours and settled mental equilibrium, she had so
changed from the slim, pallid, childish Mrs. Dale of the post office
that any old Rodchurch friends might be forgiven for saying that they
could scarcely recognize her.

"Really shouldn't have known you," said one of them frankly. "You have
furnished like a colt brought in from grass to corn."

This outspoken old friend was Mr. Allen the saddler, who turned up one
winter day when Vine-Pits had been thrown into a great state of
excitement and confusion by the passage of the hunt right across the
meadows behind the orchard. Just after dinner everybody had heard the
horn sounding in the woods, with distant holloas and deep musi