r to him that she might be the daughter of the Mr. Heron to
whom the stream belonged and from whose family name the whole dale had
taken its own; for, though she had looked and spoken like a lady, the
habit, the gauntlets, the soft felt hat were old and weather-stained:
and her familiarity with the proper treatment of a sheep in difficulty
indicated rather the farmer's daughter than that of the squire.

She was not by any means the first pretty girl Stafford had seen--he
had a very large acquaintance in London, and one or two women whose
beauty had been blazoned by the world were more than friendly
with the popular Stafford Orme--but he thought as he went up
the hill, which seemed to have no end, that he had never seen a more
beautiful face than this girl's; certainly he had never seen one which
had impressed him more deeply. Perhaps it was the character of the
loveliness which haunted him so persistently: it was so unlike the
conventional drawing-room type with which he was so familiar.

As he thought of her it seemed to him that she was like a wild and
graceful deer--one of the deer which he had seen coming down to a
mountain stream to drink on his father's Scotch moor; hers was a wild,
almost savage loveliness--and yet not savage, for there had been the
refinement, the dignity of high race in the exquisite grey eyes, the
curve of the finely cut lips. Her manner, also, prevented him from
forgetting her.

He had never met with anything like it, she had been as calm and
self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her attitude as she leant
forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had
the _abandon_ of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of
self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness,
combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him as
extraordinary, almost weird.

Stafford was not one of your susceptible young men; in fact, there was
a touch of coldness, of indifference to the other sex which often
troubled his women-friends; and he was rather surprised at himself for
the interest which the girl had aroused in him. He wondered if he
should meet her again, and was conscious of a strong, almost a very
strong, desire to do so which, he admitted to himself, was strange: for
he did not at that moment remember any girl whom, at his first meeting
with her, he had hankered to see again.

He got to the top of the hill at last and began to drop down; the