Well I wot.
With her needles she would sit,
And for hours would she knit,
Would she not?
Ah, perishable clay!
Her charms had dropped away,
One by one.
Yet when she spoke of the lover of her youth, there seemed nothing incongruous in her so doing. I forgot the Long Ago in which her tale was placed; her talk, indeed, on those occasions being of those human feelings which are independent of any epoch, took little or no colour from the past; it seemed to me a story of to-day, and as such I now relate it.
CHAPTER II.
OUT IN THE COLD.