riend of my father's; so that I've known her from a child. Stephen
Lees Noel was his curate. It was a 'snap' marriage--she was only twenty,
and had met hardly any men. Her father was ill and wanted to see her
settled before he died. Well, she found out almost directly, like a good
many other people, that she'd made an utter mistake."

Barbara came a little closer.

"What was the man like?"

"Not bad in his way, but one of those narrow, conscientious pig-headed
fellows who make the most trying kind of husband--bone egoistic. A
parson of that type has no chance at all. Every mortal thing he has to
do or say helps him to develop his worst points. The wife of a man like
that's no better than a slave. She began to show the strain of it at
last; though she's the sort who goes on till she snaps. It took him four
years to realize. Then, the question was, what were they to do? He's a
very High Churchman, with all their feeling about marriage; but luckily
his pride was wounded. Anyway, they separated two years ago; and there
she is, left high and dry. People say it was her fault. She ought to
have known her own mind--at twenty! She ought to have held on and hidden
it up somehow. Confound their thick-skinned charitable souls, what do
they know of how a sensitive woman suffers? Forgive me, Lady Barbara--I
get hot over this." He was silent; then seeing her eyes fixed on him,
went on: "Her mother died when she was born, her father soon after her
marriage. She's enough money of her own, luckily, to live on quietly. As
for him, he changed his parish and runs one somewhere in the Midlands.
One's sorry for the poor devil, too, of course! They never see each
other; and, so far as I know, they don't correspond. That, Lady Barbara,
is the simple history."

Barbara, said, "Thank you," and turned away; and he heard her mutter:
"What a shame!"

But he could not tell whether it was Mrs. Noel's fate, or the husband's
fate, or the thought of Miltoun that had moved her to those words.

She puzzled him by her self-possession, so almost hard, her way of
refusing to show feeling.' Yet what a woman she would make if the drying
curse of high-caste life were not allowed to stereotype and shrivel her!
If enthusiasm were suffered to penetrate and fertilize her soul! She
reminded him of a great tawny lily. He had a vision of her, as that
flower, floating, freed of roots and the mould of its cultivated soil,
in the liberty of the impartial air. What a