or the fraction of a second the vicar perhaps had hesitated.

"Oh! no--no. Sinned against, I am sure. A nice woman, so far as I have
seen; though I'm afraid not one of my congregation."

With this, Miltoun, in whom chivalry had already been awakened, was
content. When she asked if he knew her story, he would not for the world
have had her rake up what was painful. Whatever that story, she could
not have been to blame. She had begun already to be shaped by his own
spirit; had become not a human being as it was, but an expression of his
aspiration....

On the third evening after his passage of arms with Courtier, he was
again at her little white cottage sheltering within its high garden
walls. Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging the
old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of hiding
from the world. Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees spread their
dark boughs over the outhouses, and in any south-west wind could be
heard speaking gravely about the weather. Tall lilac bushes flanked the
garden, and a huge lime-tree in the adjoining field sighed and rustled,
or on still days let forth the drowsy hum of countless small dusky bees
who frequented that green hostelry.

He found her altering a dress, sitting over it in her peculiar delicate
fashion--as if all objects whatsoever, dresses, flowers, books, music,
required from her the same sympathy.

He had come from a long day's electioneering, had been heckled at two
meetings, and was still sore from the experience. To watch her, to
be soothed, and ministered to by her had never been so restful; and
stretched out in a long chair he listened to her playing.

Over the hill a Pierrot moon was slowly moving up in a sky the colour
of grey irises. And in a sort of trance Miltoun stared at the burnt-out
star, travelling in bright pallor.

Across the moor a sea of shallow mist was rolling; and the trees in the
valley, like browsing cattle, stood knee-deep in whiteness, with all the
air above them wan from an innumerable rain as of moondust, falling into
that white sea. Then the moon passed behind the lime-tree, so that a
great lighted Chinese lantern seemed to hang blue-black from the sky.

Suddenly, jarring and shivering the music, came a sound of hooting. It
swelled, died away, and swelled again.

Miltoun rose.

"That has spoiled my vision," he said. "Mrs. Noel, I have something I
want to say." But looking down at her, sit