Thoughts
and sayings verging on the risky were characteristic of her robust
physique, of her soul which could afford to express almost all that
occurred to it. Miltoun had never, not even as a child, given her his
confidence. She bore him no resentment, being of that large, generous
build in body and mind, rarely--never in her class--associated with the
capacity for feeling aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its
own. He was, and always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of
it! Nothing had perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his want
of behaviour in regard to women. She felt it abnormal, just as she
recognized the essential if duly veiled normality of her husband and
younger son. It was this feeling which made her realize almost more
vividly than she had time for, in the whirl of politics and fashion,
the danger of his friendship with this lady to whom she alluded so
discreetly as 'Anonyma.'
Pure chance had been responsible for the inception of that friendship.
Going one December afternoon to the farmhouse of a tenant, just killed
by a fall from his horse, Miltoun had found the widow in a state of
bewildered grief, thinly cloaked in the manner of one who had almost
lost the power to express her feelings, and quite lost it in presence
of 'the gentry.' Having assured the poor soul that she need have no
fear about her tenancy, he was just leaving, when he met, in the
stone-flagged entrance, a lady in a fur cap and jacket, carrying in her
arms a little crying boy, bleeding from a cut on the forehead.
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