CHAPTER XV.
'OF ALL MEN ELSE I HAVE AVOIDED THEE.' It was afternoon.

The white hills yonder and all the length of the valley were touched here and there with gleams of wintry sunlight, and Lady Maulevrier was taking her solitary walk in the terrace in front of her house, a stately figure wrapped in a furred mantle, tall, erect, moving with measured pace up and down the smooth gravel path.

Now and then at the end of the walk the dowager stopped for a minute or so, and stood as if in deep thought, with her eyes dreamily contemplating the landscape.

An intense melancholy shadowed her face, as she thus gazed with brooding eyes on the naked monotony of those wintry hills.

So had she looked in many and many a winter, and it seemed to her that her life was of a piece with those bleak hills, where in the dismal winter time nothing living trod.