“I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I felt myself—do not misunderstand me—suddenly and poignantly conscious of her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.” I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened. “You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another. I knew, I _knew_,” said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, “that here stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common, she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her future.” As he spoke I thought that, by the look on his face, he was again receiving what he described as an impression so powerful as to amount to an emotion. And he communicated this emotion to me, so that I felt his prophecy to be a true one, and that his story would henceforward cease to be a mere story and would become a simple unwinding off the spool of inevitable truth. He went on,— “Our silence of course couldn’t endure for ever. The girl herself seemed conscious of this, for a smile, not unfriendly, came to her lips, and she said quite simply,— “‘How you startled me! Good-morning.’ “‘I am very sorry,’ I said. ‘Can’t I make up for it by carrying those buckets for you?’ “‘Oh, they’re nothing with the yoke,’ she answered. “Here old Amos came round the corner, walking clumsily on the cobbles with his hobnailed boots. He looked surprised to find me standing with the dairymaid, a little group of two. “‘Morning!’ he cried very heartily to me. ‘You’re out betimes. Fine day, sir, fine day, fine day. Well, my girl, done with the cows?’ “‘I’m on my way to the dairy, dad,’ she said. “I asked if I might come with her. “‘Ay, go with Ruth,’ said Amos, ‘she’ll show you round,’ and he went off, evidently glad to have shifted the responsibility of my morning’s entertainment.