"Listen," she continued, as she leaned forward resting her chin on her clasped hand, while into her eyes there crept the look of one who is blind to what is actually before her, but entranced with some inward vision visible to herself alone. "Listen, and I will tell you what I can about that past which died so long ago and which is yet alive to-day. When I was a girl, scarcely more than a child, I came to live with an aunt in Bessacre village. My mother was dead, and my father, who was one of those delightful but utterly unpractical people that the world calls rolling stones, was seldom or never in England. "My aunt was a woman rather hard to describe. My father used to say that she had the brains of a rabbit and the tongue of a viper, and perhaps that best explains her. She meant to be kind, I think, but she was without exception the silliest and most empty-headed person I have ever known. I do not say this unkindly; she gave me what she could, and it was very little--just clothes and food; but of sympathy or human understanding not a particle. And so it followed that I was very lonely, which may in part account for what I have to tell. "Francis Heathcote and I were about the same age, and during the holidays we played a great deal together, and all the happiness of those childish years I owe to him. We were allowed a good deal of freedom, and there is hardly a stone or a tree in the park that does not hold some memory of delight for me. "Then of course came his college days, and he was more seldom at home, but even so something of the old comradeship remained to us. And then--one summer--circumstances threw us more closely together again. I was at the age for dreams, and as I told you before, more than half a fool, and God knows what ropes I wove out of gossamer--until--Phil came.