and to further chapters in the domestic history of those five small villages in one.  I had already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then a little impatiently.  I was impatient at being kept in, so to speak.  Out-of-doors the world was full of light and heat, full of sounds of wild birds and fragrance of flowers and new-mown hay; there were also delightful children and some that were anything but delightful—­dirty, ragged little urchins of the slums.  For even these small rustic villages have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds were fluttering out of their nests—­their hunger cries could be heard everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were wild with excitement, chasing and stoning the flutterers to slay them; or when they succeeded in capturing one without first having broken its wings or legs it was to put it in a dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably in a day or two.  Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three threatened lives in the lanes and secret green places by the stream; perhaps I didn’t; but in any case it was some satisfaction to have made the attempt.

Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the village tales—­the old unhappy things, for they were mostly old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen.  It was her eyes that did it.  At times they had an intensity in their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey.  They held me, though not because they glittered:  I could have gone away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned on my careless mind.

She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features.  No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us like a sudden puff of icy-cold air—­the revelation of a singular and powerful personality.  Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity.  With her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble.  But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice.  She was patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and—­a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a village!—­she would never speak of her ailments.  But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered about the earth.