Leigh was too attractive a man to have been allowed to reach his present age entirely ignorant of the psychology of women, though comparative poverty and laborious studies had limited his education in this direction, and left him unspoiled. He knew enough to realize the secret of Miss Wycliffe's charm, and to reflect consciously upon it in connection with himself. Mere beauty, he knew, would have left him cold, if it had not stirred within him the resentment aroused by a promise unfulfilled; intellectual gifts alone would have wearied and antagonised; evident virtue would have seemed humdrum and uninspiring. It was this delicious appeal of the woman to the man that had won him. He was yet to learn that this quality is not seldom accompanied by the most baffling counter-current, that holds its natural movement in apparent suspension. Why had a woman so imperially endowed remained so long unmarried? It was not that she looked her age, which he felt to be little less than his own, but that she implied it by her lack of inexperience. It was not that eight or nine and twenty made a spinster from the modern point of view, but that to reach that age unmarried she must have resisted many a suit. Had he lived longer in New England, he would have known more women of this kind, women who hide the passionate heart of a Helen beneath the austere life of a Diana, hoarding their gifts of love as a miser hoards his gold, partly because of cruel necessity, partly influenced by the impulse to deny inherited from Puritan ancestors. Suddenly he became aware that Cardington had been talking again, and that he had shown indifferent courtesy as a listener. He roused himself to attention, and detected at once the unusual flavour of his companion's remarks, from which all jest had gone, showing instead a poetical and reminiscent mood. "The silhouettes of the trees which the electric light throws upon the walk," he was saying, "remind me of a wonderful moonlight night I once spent at Assisi. I was younger then than I am now, and it was my first journey in that land of enchantment. I travelled as lightly as one of the apostles, with staff and scrip, so to speak, and having resisted the efforts of the cabman at the station to rob me, I started to walk up to the city alone. I understand they have a trolley line now,--just imagine the profanation of a trolley line in the ancient city of St. Francis!--but at the time of which I speak, the atmosphere of the Middle Ages still hung over the place unbroken.