surer of a world beyond this where there is neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air more motionless and cool; the
russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the
valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margret
turned from the road, and went down the fields. One did not wonder,
feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that
this woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still,
with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.

Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had
left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of
them off her brain. No miles could measure the distance between her
home and them. At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting.
She hurried now, her cheek colouring. Dr. Knowles could see them going
to the house beyond, talking earnestly. He sat down in the darkening
twilight on the stile, and waited half an hour. He did not care to
hear the story of Margret's first day at the mill, knowing how her
father and mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It
was nothing to her, he knew. So he waited. After a while he heard the
old man's laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went in and
took her place beside him. She went out, but came back presently,
every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl gray. The
neutral tint suited her well. As she stood by the window, listening
gravely to them, the homely face and waiting figure came into full
relief. Nature had made the woman in a freak of rare sincerity. There
were no reflected lights about her; no gloss on her skin, no glitter in
her eyes, no varnish on her soul. Simple and dark and pure, there she
was, for God and her master to conquer and understand. Her flesh was
cold and colourless,--there were no surface tints on it,--it warmed
sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,--out of her heart;
her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in
unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It
had been cut from the head of a man, who, unconscious, simple as a
child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world at
defiance,--Bysshe Shelley.

The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively, took in
every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus blade which he
was going to carry into battle. Ther