n take you home in it.'

'No; please don't leave me alone under these dismal trees!' Neither
would she hear of his getting her any wraps; and, opening her little
sunshade to keep the rain out of her face, she walked with him across the
insulating field, after which the trees of the park afforded her a
sufficient shelter to reach home without much damage.

Swithin was too greatly affected by what he had overheard to speak much
to her on the way, and protected her as if she had been a shorn lamb.
After a farewell which had more meaning than sound in it, he hastened
back to Rings-Hill Speer. The work-folk were still in the hut, and, by
dint of friendly converse and a sip at the flagon, had so cheered Mr. and
Mrs. Anthony Green that they neither thought nor cared what had become of
Lady Constantine.

St. Cleeve's sudden sense of new relations with that sweet patroness had
taken away in one half-hour his natural ingenuousness. Henceforth he
could act a part.

'I have made all secure at the top,' he said, putting his head into the
hut. 'I am now going home. When the rain stops, lock this door and
bring the key to my house.'

XIV

The laboured resistance which Lady Constantine's judgment had offered to
her rebellious affection ere she learnt that she was a widow, now passed
into a bashfulness that rendered her almost as unstable of mood as
before. But she was one of that mettle--fervid, cordial, and
spontaneous--who had not the heart to spoil a passion; and her affairs
having gone to rack and ruin by no fault of her own she was left to a
painfully narrowed existence which lent even something of rationality to
her attachment. Thus it was that her tender and unambitious soul found
comfort in her reverses.

As for St. Cleeve, the tardiness of his awakening was the natural result
of inexperience combined with devotion to a hobby. But, like a spring
bud hard in bursting, the delay was compensated by after speed. At once
breathlessly recognizing in this fellow-watcher of the skies a woman who
loved him, in addition to the patroness and friend, he truly translated
the nearly forgotten kiss she had given him in her moment of despair.

Lady Constantine, in being eight or nine years his senior, was an object
even better calculated to nourish a youth's first passion than a girl of
his own age, superiority of experience and ripeness of emotion exercising
the same peculiar fascination over him as over other young me