How much better it would be, she thought, if he knew her story from the first.  He might then be as friendly as he pleased; there would be no danger in it, to him or to her.  She almost determined to go at once and ask the vicar’s advice.  But by the time she had nearly made up her mind it was the hour for luncheon, and little Nellie’s appetite was exigent.  By the time lunch was over her determination had changed.  She had reflected that the vicar would think her morbid, that, with his usual good sense, he would say there was no necessity for telling the squire anything; indeed, that to do so would be undignified.  If the squire were indeed going to lead the life of a recluse as he proposed doing, he was not really a man to cause her any apprehension.  If he had travelled about the world for forty years, without having his heart disturbed by any of the women he must have met in that time, he was certainly not the kind of man, when once he had determined to settle in his home, to fall in love with the first pretty woman he met.  It was absurd; there was no likelihood of it; it was her own miserable vanity, she told herself, which made the thing seem probable, and she would not think any more about it.  She, a woman thirty-one years of age, with a daughter who ere long would be growing up to womanhood!  To be afraid of a mere stranger like Mr. Juxon—­afraid lest he should fall in love with her!  Could anything be more ridiculous?  Her duty was to live quietly as she had lived before, to take no more notice of the squire than was necessary in order to be civil, and so all would be well.

And so it seemed for a long time.  The squire improved the garden of the cottage and Mrs. Goddard and Nellie, with the Ambroses, dined at the Hall, which at first seemed an exceedingly dreary and dismal place, but which, as they returned thither again and again, grew more and more luxurious, till the transformation was complete.  Mr. Juxon brought all manner of things to the house; vans upon vans arrived, laden with boxes of books and pictures and oriental carpets and rare objects which the squire had collected in his many years of travel, and which he appeared to have stored in London until he had at last inherited the Hall.  The longer the Ambroses and Mrs. Goddard knew him, the more singularly impressed they were with his reticence concerning himself.  He appeared to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, and he had certainly brought back a vast collection of more or less valuable objects from his travels, besides the large library he had accumulated and which contained many rare and curious editions of ancient books.  He was evidently a man of very good education, and a much better scholar than he was willing to allow.  The vicar delighted in his society and when the two found themselves together in the great room which Mr. Juxon had lined with well-filled shelves, they remained for hours absorbed in literary and scholastic talk.  But whenever the vicar approached the subject