“A witch, sir, they’d called her. Not so far wrong there! Between you and me and the bottle I’ve never been able to forget her. A strange creature—all the women I’ve known would have gone off in a screaming fit or a swoon. Not she. The first thing she does is to whip open one of her little bundles and out with her handkerchief, and wipe and bind the boy’s broken head as he squatted beside her; and then she turns to me on the other side and hands me a scarf, and says she: ‘Would I be so kind as to tie it round her arm, as tight as might be.’ And then I saw an ugly gash in the pretty white flesh. ‘A hit with a stone,’ she says. And not another word could I get, nor the other old boy (who was green with jealousy at her speaking with me), nor John the coachman, though he called her ‘my dear,’ and was as round as round with her, a fatherly sort of man that any young female might confide in. “She just pulled her hood over her face and lay back folding her arms, the sound one over the hurt one, and sat staring at the gray wet walls of Cheveral park as we skirted them. Her face looked like a white rose in the black shadow, and by and by, I saw the great tears begin to gather and roll down her cheeks one by one. I tell you, sir, my heart’s not a particularly soft one, but it made it ache. “Well, we set her down and her cat and her boy at York House. She paid the boy’s fare and thanked us. I thought she was going in at the York—but she went up without another word by Bartlett street. And I never saw her again, nor heard more of her story.—Pass the bottle.” THE STAR DREAMER BOOK IV Haunted by the starry head Of her whose gentle will has changed my faith And made my life a perfumed altar flame. TENNYSON (_Maud_) CHAPTER I AH ME, THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN! I cry to vacant chairs and widowed walls, My house is left unto me desolate. —TENNYSON (_Aylmer’s Field_). Bindon woods were growing yellow. After an early and glorious summer, rain had set in with much wind and storm, and though it was but the first of September, the country had already begun to don its autumn livery. Sir David, returning from a devious pilgrimage, rode slowly up the avenue. There was the scent of fallen leaves in the air and the ground beneath the tread of his horse’s feet was sodden and spongy. It was a sad and cloudy afternoon, with just now a brief respite between two gusts of wind and rain, a streak of blue in the watery sky above the soaking land. He had come fast and far; his horse was mud-bespattered, his riding-boots discoloured to the knees. Both rider and steed seemed dejected: so comes a man home from fruitless quest.