"Yes," said I disingenuously; "but you don't remember very clearly things that happened when you were in such suffering, you know." "Of course not, you poor darling! I don't suppose you really saw him a bit. Still your heroes are very like him." After this I tried a course of fair heroes, but somehow I didn't succeed with them so well. That is the worst of having such limited experience as we have. I can't get my own brothers to stand for their portraits, and outside them I know only Dr. Devine and Mr. Benson, and the people in the village, and none of those are at all heroic. CHAPTER V. FREDA. Aline always said that it was providential that Freda should have married, and married a rich man. She told Freda so herself one day, I remember, for I was in the room, but Freda only put out her red mouth, and said that she couldn't see things in that light at all, that she could have endured poverty with the best of us, and as for Jim's being a rich man, well, she would have married him if he hadn't had a sole to his boot, or a rag to his back. Poor, dear, dear old Jim, it was as hard to imagine him shabby, as it is now to imagine Freda back again in our ramshackle life. He was always so fresh and trim, with such immaculate linen, and clothes that even we rustics felt were a marvel of the tailor's art. What a dear, jolly, open-handed fellow he was! and how little any of us could have believed that he would only live two years, and leave Freda a young widow at twenty. But, after all, as Esther says, Freda was perfectly happy for two years, and that is not given to many people. And then, too, she has her little son, who is such a dear little boy,--or was when we saw him two years old,--that no mother could be very unhappy possessing him. Jim had been visiting old Mrs. Doyne at the Valley House when he and Freda saw each other and fell in love at first sight; and that, says Esther, is the only possible love. I remember Freda that summer. She used to wear a green muslin that had once belonged to our grandmother, and she looked lovely in it. She was wearing it the very first day she ever saw Jim. Mrs. Doyne was an old friend of mother's, and while she lived we used to go a good deal to the Valley House. Her only son Alick was in India, and she was very lonely, and liked to have us about her. I think she hoped that Alick would come home, and that he and Freda would make a match of it, for Freda was her favourite. We hadn't the least idea that she had a visitor that June afternoon when Freda and I set out to have tea with Mrs. Doyne, I looking forward agreeably to the strawberries and cream and the tea-cakes, and the delicious rich tea in the faded sweet-smelling drawing-room at the Valley House.