like when she was
kissing a rose with a certain knight in armour in a square garden,
since for some perverse reason it was this picture that remained so
painfully clear to his mind. Then he drifted off into speculations upon
the general mystery of things of a sort that were common with him, and
in these became oblivious of all else.

He did not even hear or see a tall young woman enter the church, clad
in summer white, no, not when she was within five pace and, becoming
suddenly aware of his presence, had stopped to study him with the
acutest interest. In a flash Isobel knew who he was. Of course he was
much changed, for Godfrey, who had matured early, as those of his
generation were apt to do, especially if they had led a varied life,
was now a handsome and well-built young man with a fine, thoughtful
face and a quite respectable moustache.

"How he has changed, oh! how he has changed," she thought to herself.
The raw boy had become a man, and as she knew at once by her woman's
instinct, a man with a great deal in him. Isobel was a sensible member
of her sex; one, too, who had seen something of the world by now, and
she did not expect or wish for a hero or a saint built upon the
mid-Victorian pattern, as portrayed in the books of the lady novelists
of that period. She wanted a man to be a man, by preference with the
faults pertaining to the male nature, since she had observed that those
who lacked these, possessed others, which to her robust womanhood
seemed far worse, such as meanness and avarice and backbiting, and all
the other qualities of the Pharisee.

Well, in Godfrey, whether she were right or wrong, with that swift
glance of hers, she seemed to recognise a man as she wished a man to
be. If that standard of hers meant that very possibly he had admired
other women, the lady whom he had pulled up a precipice, for instance,
she did not mind particularly, so long as he admired her, Isobel, most
of all. That was her one _sine qua non_, that he should admire her most
of all, or rather be fondest of her in his innermost self.

What was she thinking about? What was there to show that he cared one
brass farthing about her? Nothing at all. And yet, why was he here
where she had parted from him so long ago? Surely not to stare at the
grave of a dead woman with whom he could have had nothing to do, since
she left the world some five centuries before. And another question.
What had brought her here, she who hated church