Pure chance had been responsible for the inception of that friendship.  Going one December afternoon to the farmhouse of a tenant, just killed by a fall from his horse, Miltoun had found the widow in a state of bewildered grief, thinly cloaked in the manner of one who had almost lost the power to express her feelings, and quite lost it in presence of ’the gentry.’  Having assured the poor soul that she need have no fear about her tenancy, he was just leaving, when he met, in the stone-flagged entrance, a lady in a fur cap and jacket, carrying in her arms a little crying boy, bleeding from a cut on the forehead.  Taking him from her and placing him on a table in the parlour, Miltoun looked at this lady, and saw that she was extremely grave, and soft, and charming.  He inquired of her whether the mother should be told.

She shook her head.

“Poor thing, not just now:  let’s wash it, and bind it up first.”

Together therefore they washed and bound up the cut.  Having finished, she looked at Miltoun, and seemed to say:  “You would do the telling so much better than I.”

He, therefore, told the mother and was rewarded by a little smile from the grave lady.

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....