She had left the convent when ten years of age, on the death of her mother. Her father--but then gossip was never kind. He was an officer who had deserted his pretty little wife for another woman--or so rumor had it; and her mother had died, a flower stricken by a frost. The daughter had been taken by a relative, the owner of a lonely mill, and for six years had lived in solitude, her horizon of life limited to the adjacent village, her knowledge of women gained from the memory of a sad, yearning face, paler than the pillow on which it rested, and an occasional visit to the curé's sister. Of men she knew only her uncle and the few villagers that had not gone to fight for La Belle France. From unquestioning childhood she had passed to that stage in a girl's life when the emotions leap past the brain, fretful of the latter's plodding pace. Her mind untutored, unsharpened by contact with other minds, left her the language and the reasonings of a child; but her imagination, feeding on the strange longings and dreams which permeated her life, pictured its own world where romance held sway over all the creatures that inhabited its realm. It is the instinct of a little child to picture unreal things--the unconscious protest of immaturity against the commonplaceness of life. But with the education of to-day and the labyrinth of artificiality which characterizes modern living, the imaginativeness of childhood disappears, except in a few great minds who, retaining it, are hailed by the world as possessors of genius. Unhampered (or unhelped, as the case may be) by association with the patchwork pattern of society, the miller's niece had retained her gift of imagination, without which the solitude and the monotony of her days would have been unendurable; until, blending it with the budding flower of womanhood, she found mystery in the moaning of the wind. While the sun danced upon the grass her spirit mingled with the sunlight; and when the moon exercised her suzerainty of the heavens the poetry in her soul thrilled to sweet dreams of lover's wooings (though her unreasoned rapture often ended in unreasoned tears upon the pillow).... She found melancholy in the coloring of an autumn leaf, and laughter in the music of the mill-stream.... There were smugglers' tales in a northeast gale, and fairy stories in a summer's shower. The doctrine of pleasure so feverishly followed by her sisters to-day was unknown to her--as was its insidious reaction which comes to so many women, with the dulling of the perceptions, the blinding of eyes to the colors of life, the deadening of ears to the music of nature, until they cannot hear the subtle melody of happiness itself, so closely allied to the somber beauty of sorrow. "Little one"--the aviator's voice was very soft, so that the ticking of the clock sounded clearly above it--"in a few minutes I must go. It is a dark night, and of necessity I must get to the village to-night, and be on my way before dawn."