“Three years! Time hasn’t flown. Is it not like an old memory, his living here in this house, Soolsby, and all that happened then?” Soolsby looked at her over his glasses, resting his chin on the back of the chair he was caning, and his lips worked in and out with a suppressed smile. “Time’s got naught to do with you. He’s afeard of you,” he continued. “He lets you be.” “Friend, thee knows I am almost an old woman now.” She made marks abstractedly upon the corner of a piece of paper. “Unless my hair turns grey presently I must bleach it, for ‘twill seem improper it should remain so brown.” She smoothed it back with her hand. Try as she would to keep it trim after the manner of her people, it still waved loosely on her forehead and over her ears. And the grey bonnet she wore but added piquancy to its luxuriance, gave a sweet gravity to the demure beauty of the face it sheltered. “I am thirty now,” she murmured, with a sigh, and went on writing. The old man’s fingers moved quickly among the strips of cane, and, after a silence, without raising his head, he said: “Thirty, it means naught.” “To those without understanding,” she rejoined drily. “‘Tis tough understanding why there’s no wedding-ring on yonder finger. There’s been many a man that’s wanted it, that’s true--the Squire’s son from Bridgley, the lord of Axwood Manor, the long soldier from Shipley Wood, and doctors, and such folk aplenty. There’s where understanding fails.” Faith’s face flushed, then it became pale, and her eyes, suffused, dropped upon the paper before her. At first it seemed as though she must resent his boldness; but she had made a friend of him these years past, and she knew he meant no rudeness. In the past they had talked of things deeper and more intimate still. Yet there was that in his words which touched a sensitive corner of her nature. “Why should I be marrying?” she asked presently. “There was my sister’s son all those years. I had to care for him.” “Ay, older than him by a thimbleful!” he rejoined. “Nay, till he came to live in this hut alone older by many a year. Since then he is older than me by fifty. I had not thought of marriage before he went away. Squire’s son, soldier, or pillman, what were they to me! He needed me. They came, did they? Well, and if they came?” “And since the Egyptian went?” A sort of sob came into her throat. “He does not need me, but he may--he will one day; and then I shall be ready. But now--” Old Soolsby’s face turned away. His house overlooked every house in the valley beneath: he could see nearly every garden; he could even recognise many in the far streets. Besides, there hung along two nails on the wall a telescope, relic of days when he sailed the main. The grounds of the Cloistered House and the fruit-decked garden-wall of the Red Mansion were ever within his vision. Once, twice, thrice, he had seen what he had seen, and dark feelings, harsh emotions, had been roused in him.