stering instinct of mothers in a maidenly hiding, ready to
come at need. She wore her plain blue clothes as if unconscious of them
and their incomplete response to the note of time. A woman would have
detected that she trimmed her own hat, a flat, wide-brimmed straw with a
formless bow and a feather worthy only in long service. A man would
have cherished the memory of her thin rose-flushed face with the crisp
touches of sedate inquiry about the eyes. "Do you want anything?" Anne's
eyes were always asking clearly. "Let me get it for you." But even a man
thus tenderly alive to her charm would have thought her older than she
was, a sweet sisterly creature to be reverentially regarded.

Lydia was the product of a different mould. She was the woman, though a
girl in years and look, not removed by chill timidities from woman's
normal hopes, the clean animal in her curved mouth, the trick of parting
her lips for a long breath because, for the gusto of life, the ordinary
breath wouldn't always do, and showing most excellent teeth, the little
square chin, dauntless in strength, the eyes dauntless, too, and hair
all a brown gloss with high lights on it, very free about her forehead.
She was not so tall as Anne, but graciously formed and plumper.
Curiously, they did not seem racially unlike the colonel who, to their
passionate loyalties, was "father" not a line removed. In the delicacy
of his patrician type he might even have been "grandfather", for he
looked older than he was, the worsted prey of circumstance. He had met
trouble that would not be evaded, and if he might be said to have
conquered, it was only from regarding it with a perplexed immobility, so
puzzling was it in a world where honour, he thought, was absolutely
defined and a social crime as inexplicable as it was rending.

And while the three wait to have their outlines thus inadequately
sketched, the hackman waits, too, he of a more persistent hope than his
fellows who have gone heavily rolling away to the stable, it being now
six o'clock and this the last train.

Lydia was a young woman of fervid recognitions. She liked to take a day
and stamp it for her own, to say of this, perhaps: "It was the ninth of
April when we went to Addington, and it was a heavenly day. There was a
clear sky and I could see Farvie's beautiful nose and chin against it
and Anne's feather all out of curl. Dear Anne! dear Farvie! Everything
smelled of dirt, good, honest dirt, not city sculch