From that meeting he took away the knowledge of her name, Audrey Lees Noel, and the remembrance of a face, whose beauty, under a cap of squirrel’s fur, pursued him.  Some days later passing by the village green, he saw her entering a garden gate.  On this occasion he had asked her whether she would like her cottage re-thatched; an inspection of the roof had followed; he had stayed talking a long time.  Accustomed to women—­over the best of whom, for all their grace and lack of affectation, high-caste life had wrapped the manner which seems to take all things for granted—­there was a peculiar charm for Miltoun in this soft, dark-eyed lady who evidently lived quite out of the world, and had so poignant, and shy, a flavour.  Thus from a chance seed had blossomed swiftly one of those rare friendships between lonely people, which can in short time fill great spaces of two lives.

One day she asked him:  “You know about me, I suppose?” Miltoun made a motion of his head, signifying that he did.  His informant had been the vicar.

“Yes, I am told, her story is a sad one—­a divorce.”

“Do you mean that she has been divorced, or——­”

For the fraction of a second the vicar perhaps had hesitated.

“Oh! no—­no.  Sinned against, I am sure.  A nice woman, so far as I have seen; though I’m afraid not one of my congregation.”

With this, Miltoun, in whom chivalry had already been awakened, was content.  When she asked if he knew her story, he would not for the world have had her rake up what was painful.  Whatever that story, she could not have been to blame.  She had begun already to be shaped by his own spirit; had become not a human being as it was, but an expression of his aspiration....

On the third evening after his passage of arms with Courtier, he was again at her little white cottage sheltering within its high garden walls.  Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging the old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of hiding from the world.  Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees spread their dark boughs over the outhouses, and in any south-west wind could be heard speaking gravely about the weather.  Tall lilac bushes flanked the garden, and a huge lime-tree in the adjoining field sighed and rustled, or on still days let forth the drowsy hum of countless small dusky bees who frequented that green hostelry.

He found her altering a dress, sitting over it in her peculiar delicate fashion—­as if all objects whatsoever, dresses, flowers, books, music, required from her the same sympathy.

He had come from a long day’s electioneering, had been heckled at two meetings, and was still sore from the experience.  To watch her, to be soothed, and ministered to by her had never been so restful; and stretched out in a long chair he listened to her playing.

Over the hill a Pierrot moon was slowly moving up in a sky the colour of grey irises.  And in a sort of trance Miltoun stared at the burnt-out star, travelling in bright pallor.