And she had been so kind, and simple and wise.

Had she perhaps once had a _tendresse_ for him--before she met Ned Pitstone ?--and if things had gone--differently--might he not, perhaps, have married her?
Quite possibly.

In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with.

He had done what he could to ease her suffering life.
Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.
She was afraid for her child; afraid for her friend; afraid for the world.

The only hope of happiness for a woman, she believed, lay in an honest lover, if such a lover could be found.