self-love would have languished of inanition.  It was Hilaria who healed his hurts, though with increasing difficulty.  For there is little gulf, and that easily bridged, between the very young child and the old man, but between the adolescent and the old it is wide and deep.  And she was eager where he was retiring, confident where he was suspicious.  With what of pity, lovely but half-patronising too, did she solace him!...  Between them lay the gulf not only of a generation but of a different habit of thought, of alien tastes, which not all his passionate clutching or her impatient tenderness could bridge for more than a few moments of clinging together against the world.  None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without knowing why.

Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost necessities of life.  Her low brow—­truly Greek in its straightness and the crisp ripple of her hair around it—­was not in favour at that time.  The hair, which was of a dull ashen brown, was strained back tightly and confined by a round comb.  Her eyebrows, too straight for the period and too thick, nearly met above the short, tip-tilted nose, freckled as a plover’s egg, and that at a time when no well brought-up damsel ventured forth in the sun’s rays without veil or parasol.  Her face was deficient in modelling, being one of those subtly concave faces not without a fascination of their own, with an egg-like curve of prominent delicately-square chin.  Her mouth, too large, opened very beautifully when she laughed over square thickly-white teeth.  Her eyes were small and of no particular colour, though bright with a birdlike shining between the thick short lashes of a neutral brown.  She had a something boyish in poise and action that really made her charm, but that also set her hopelessly out of her time.  It was impossible to imagine Hilaria happy in a crinoline, and she fought them fiercely, yet crinolines were in full flower, and the one disported by the doctor’s daughter of a Sunday was the admiration and envy of the feminine members of the town.  “I should feel I was in a cage,” quoth Hilaria at the suggestion that she should trammel her long legs in such a contraption—­unconsciously hitting on the essential reason for the allure of crinolines.  She had to wear one now for dancing-class, as it made movement and spacing so different; but other times she went her wilful way, short nose in air, encouraged by the complacence of her father, who had no more knowledge of what the country people called her “goings-on” than if he had lived in an alien clime.

Hilaria was a hoyden.  She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil, sewing, and deportment.  She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing trees.  She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad way.  That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer Eve was proof of all these things, and yet what a scandal it made in St. Renny when the fact leaked out!...