As Stafford climbed the hill steadily, he wondered who the girl was. It

did not occur to him that she might be the daughter of the Mr. Heron to

whom the stream belonged and from whose family name the whole dale had

taken its own; for, though she had looked and spoken like a lady, the

habit, the gauntlets, the soft felt hat were old and weather-stained:

and her familiarity with the proper treatment of a sheep in difficulty

indicated rather the farmer's daughter than that of the squire.

She was not by any means the first pretty girl Stafford had seen--he

had a very large acquaintance in London, and one or two women whose

beauty had been blazoned by the world were more than friendly

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with the popular Stafford Orme--but he thought as he went up

the hill, which seemed to have no end, that he had never seen a more

beautiful face than this girl's; certainly he had never seen one which

had impressed him more deeply. Perhaps it was the character of the

loveliness which haunted him so persistently: it was so unlike the

conventional drawing-room type with which he was so familiar.

As he thought of her it seemed to him that she was like a wild and

graceful deer--one of the deer which he had seen coming down to a

mountain stream to drink on his father's Scotch moor; hers was a wild,

almost savage loveliness--and yet not savage, for there had been the

refinement, the dignity of high race in the exquisite grey eyes, the

curve of the finely cut lips. Her manner, also, prevented him from

forgetting her.

He had never met with anything like it, she had been as calm and

self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her attitude as she leant

forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had

the _abandon_ of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of

self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness,

combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him as

extraordinary, almost weird.

Stafford was not one of your susceptible young men; in fact, there was

a touch of coldness, of indifference to the other sex which often

troubled his women-friends; and he was rather surprised at himself for

the interest which the girl had aroused in him. He wondered if he

should meet her again, and was conscious of a strong, almost a very

strong, desire to do so which, he admitted to himself, was strange: for

he did not at that moment remember any girl whom, at his first meeting

with her, he had hankered to see again.




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