Miss March smiled—her smile was sad.
"In one sense, no, I should think it highly improbable; in another, yes, there must be the ghost of some great sorrow about the face you describe," she said.
So there was.
This is the story.
At the farther end of Scarby village—the farther end, that is to say, from Monksholdings and the path between the hills—the road drops again somewhat suddenly. Only for a short distance, however; Mayling Farm—"Giles's" as it is colloquially called—which is the first house you come to when you reach level ground again, being by no means low lying.
On the contrary, the west windows command a grand view of the great Scarshire plain beneath, bordered by the faint hazy blue, scarcely to be distinguished from clouds, of the long range of hills concealing the far-off glimmer of the ocean, which otherwise might sometimes be perceptible.
Mayling is a very old place, and the Giles's had been there "always," so to speak—steady-going, unambitious, save as regards their farming and its success; they had been just the make of men to settle on to their ground as if it and they could have no existence apart. A fine race physically as well as morally, though some twenty-five years or so before the Raynalds bought Monksholdings, a run of ill luck, a whole chapter of casualties, had brought them down to but one representative, and he scarcely the typical Farmer Giles of Mayling.
This was Barnett, the youngest of four stalwart sons; the youngest and the only survivor. He was already forty when his father died, earnestly commending to him the "old place," which even at eighty the aged farmer felt himself better fitted to manage than the somewhat delicate, sensitive man whom his brothers had made good-natured fun of in his youth as a "book-worm".
But Barnett was intelligent and sensible, and he rose to the occasion. Circumstances helped him. The year after old Giles's death Barnett for the first time fell in love, wisely and well. His affection was bestowed on a worthy object—Marion Grover, the daughter of a yeoman in the next county—and was fully returned.
Marion was years younger than her lover, fifteen at least, eminently practical, healthy, and pretty. She brought her husband just exactly what he was most in need of—brightness, energy, and youth. It was an ideal marriage, and everything prospered at Mayling. Four years after the advent of the new Mrs. Giles you would scarcely have recognised the farmer, he seemed another man.