Ella Forte was barely twenty-one, yet for years had she worked, and scraped, and saved, so that the little household--herself, her father, and a single-handed servant--might subsist in tolerable comfort; that there might be something still in hand for parish claims, for possible emergencies, for, at least, a passably respectable appearance. She gloried in her management, she knew no discontent, she was proud to fill the post surrendered by her mother, who lay beneath a shrinking mound in the churchyard just beyond the vicarage domain. She was complacently convinced of her father's dependence upon her, and of her influence in the village, where she had no rival, for the squire's house stood empty, closed, falling into disrepair, its owner dwelling out of England, crippled by a dwindling rent-roll and heavy charges on the property. This morning she sang blithely as she crossed the lawn that more nearly resembled a hay-field--sang one of the hymns she had selected for to-morrow's service, to be led by herself to her own strenuous accompaniment on the aged harmonium and the raucous voices of the village congregation. The sun shone on her hair, that glinted golden, crinkling over her little head, gathered into a then unfashionable knob at the nape of her slim, white neck. And Captain Coventry, riding along the road, looked over the privet hedge and thought he had never beheld anything on this earth to compare with its glory. Why, the girl's hair was like "kincob," like the border of a nautch woman's veil, like the work on a rajah's robe! Captain Coventry had just returned from India, and the glamour of the East was still upon him--the East that is so very different to look back upon when a man's whole service need not be spent in exile. Just now he was on short leave, and his regiment--an English line regiment--would be returning home in two years' time. India, to him, was yet a pleasant quarter of the globe that meant sport (his passion) well within his means, cheaper comfort, cheaper living, amusements that were welcome to his outdoor tastes, not to speak of soldiering experiences of the finest next to active service. He was on a visit to his widowed mother and his spinster sister, who lived in the little country town lying at the base of the hills that jutted out like monstrous knuckles over the Severn Valley; and feeling slightly bored, in need of exercise, of movement, he had hired a horse and was exploring Cotswold villages on morning rides. So it came about that on this perfect summer day he had passed through Under-edge, and was arrested now by the vision of a girl with golden head and bright blue gown in the garden of a wayside vicarage. Involuntarily he checked his mount, and from behind the hedge he watched the slim blue figure move across the grass and stand for a moment outlined against a door in an ivy-covered garden wall. She was singing as she wrestled with a rusty latch: