“When I came back from India fourteen years ago on the sick-list,” began the Captain, “I went down to Brighton, a place I had been fond of in my young days, to recruit.  It was in the early spring, quite out of the fashionable season, and the town was very empty.  My lodgings were in a dull street at the extreme east, leading away from the sea, but within sight and sound of it.  The solitude and quiet of the place suited me; and I used to walk up and down the cliff in the dusk of evening enjoying the perfect loneliness of the scene.  The house I lived in was a comfortable one, kept by an elderly widow who was a pattern of neatness and propriety.  There were no children; for some time no other lodgers; and the place was as quiet as the grave.  All this suited me very well.  I wanted rest, and I was getting it.

“I had been at Brighton about a month, when the drawing-room floor over my head was taken by a lady, and her little girl of about five years old.  I used to hear the child’s feet pattering about the room; but she was not a noisy child by any means; and when I did happen to hear her voice, it had a very pleasant sound to me.  The lady was an invalid, and was a good deal of trouble, my landlady took occasion to tell me, as she had no maid of her own.  Her name was Nowell.

“Soon after this I encountered her on the cliff one afternoon with her little girl.  The child and I had met once or twice before in the hall; and her recognition of me led to a little friendly talk between me and the mother.  She was a fragile delicate-looking woman, who had once been very pretty, but whose beauty had for the most part been worn away, either by ill-health or trouble.  She was very young, five-and-twenty at the utmost.  She told me that the little girl was her only child, and that her husband was away from England, but that she expected his return before long.

“After this we met almost every afternoon; and I began to look out for these meetings, and our quiet talk upon the solitary cliff, as the pleasantest part of my day.  There was a winning grace about this Mrs. Nowell’s manner that I had never seen in any other woman; and I grew to be more interested in her than I cared to confess to myself.  It matters little now; and I may freely own how weak I was in those days.

“I could see that she was very ill, and I did not need the ominous hints of the landlady, who had contrived to question Mrs. Nowell’s doctor, to inspire me with the dread that she might never recover.  I thought of her a great deal, and watched the fading light in her eyes, and listened to the weakening tones of her voice, with a sense of trouble that seemed utterly disproportionate to the occasion.  I will not say that I loved her; neither the fact that she was another man’s wife, nor the fact that she was soon to die, was ever absent from my mind when I thought of her.  I will only say that she was more to me than any woman had ever been before, or has ever been since.  It was the one sentimental episode of my life, and a very brief one.