together.  My mother was stunned, and never completely recovered.  I have seen her, forty years after George Butts’ wedding-day, lift up her hands, and have heard her call out with emotion, as fresh as if the event were of yesterday, “What made that girl have George I can not think—­but there!” What she meant by the last two words we could not comprehend.  Many of her acquaintances interpreted them to mean that she knew more than she dared communicate, but I think they were mistaken.  I am quite certain if she had known anything she must have told it, and, in the next place, the phrase “but there” was not uncommon amongst women in our town, and was supposed to mark the consciousness of a prudently restrained ability to give an explanation of mysterious phenomena in human relationships.  For my own part, I am just as much in the dark as my mother.  My father, who was a shrewd man, was always puzzled, and could not read the riddle.  He used to say that he never thought George could have “made up” to any young woman, and it was quite clear that Miss Leroy did not either then or afterwards display any violent affection for him.  I have heard her criticise and patronise him as a “good soul,” but incapable, as indeed he was, of all sympathy with her.  After marriage she went her way and he his.  She got up early, as she was wont to do, and took her Bible into the fields while he was snoring.  She would then very likely suffer from a terrible headache during the rest of the day, and lie down for hours, letting the house manage itself as best it could.  What made her selection of George more obscure was that she was much admired by many young fellows, some of whom were certainly more akin to her than he was; and I have heard from one or two reports of encouraging words, and even something more than words, which she had vouchsafed to them.  A solution is impossible.  The affinities, repulsions, reasons in a nature like that of Miss Leroy’s are so secret and so subtle, working towards such incalculable and not-to-be-predicted results, that to attempt to make a major and minor premiss and an inevitable conclusion out of them would be useless.  One thing was clear, that by marrying George she gained great freedom.  If she had married anybody closer to her, she might have jarred with him; there might have been collision and wreck as complete as if they had been entirely opposed; for she was not the kind of person to accommodate herself to others even in the matter of small differences.  But George’s road through space lay entirely apart from hers, and there was not the slightest chance of interference.  She was under the protection of a husband; she could do things that, as an unmarried woman, especially in a foreign land, she could not do, and the compensatory sacrifice to her was small.  This is really the only attempt at elucidation I can give.  She went regularly all her life to chapel with George, but even when he became deacon, and “supplied”