ture, the child of a more
ancient and a simpler world, she was in no sort slow of intelligence or
wanton. What had been, sufficed her. She cried out neither for further
indulgence of passion, nor against barriers imposed by circumstance and
class. That which she had done, she had done open-eyed, counting and
accepting the cost. Since then wooers were not lacking; but she turned a
deaf ear to all and each. A frank materialist in some ways, she proved an
idealist in this. No subsequent love passage could rival, in wonder or
beauty, that first one; since, compared with Charles Verity, the men who
subsequently aspired to her favours--whether in wedlock or out--were, to
her taste, at best dull, loutish fellows, at worst no more than human
jackasses or human swine.

And, through it all, she possessed the boy on whom to spend her heart, in
whose interests to employ her foresight and singular capacity of
money-making. For love's sake therefore, and for his sake also, she had
lived without reproach, a woman chary even of friendship, chary, too, of
laughter, chary above all of purposeless gaddings and of gossip.
Business, and the boy's sea-going or returning, might take her as far as
Southampton, Plymouth, Cardiff, more rarely London or some northern port.
But Deadham village rarely beheld her, and never, it is to be feared, did
the inside of Deadham church.

Yet Deadham church bell plaintively, insistently tolling, the sound
reaching her muted by the thickness of the fog, kept her attention on the
stretch for the ensuing hour. Startling as it was poignant, Charles
Verity's demand to see her, six days ago, brought the story of her love
to full circle. Their meeting had been of the briefest, for he was
exhausted by pain. But that he had sent, and she had gone, was unlocked
for largesse on the part of fortune, sufficient to give her deep-seated
and abiding sense of healing and of gain. And this stayed by her now,
rather than any active call for mourning.

She inhaled the dank chillness of the fog gratefully. It suited the
occasion better far than sunshine and bright skies. For winter,
darkness, sullen flowing waters and desolate crying winds furnished the
accompaniment of those earlier meetings. Hearing the tolling bell she
strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting
wealth and precision of detail. Not only vision but sense pushed
backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with
susp