She was only a young girl, poor and helpless, born of poor and helpless parents dead long ago.

There was in her veins no gentle blood; she had none of the world's goods; her gown was torn, her feet went bare.

She had youth, but not its heritage of gladness: beauty, but none to see it; a nature that reached toward light and height, and for its home the house which he had lately left.

He was a man older by many years than the girl beside him, knowing good and evil; by instinct preferring the former, but at times stooping, open-eyed, to that degree of the latter which a lax and gay world held to be not incompatible with a convention somewhat misnamed "the honor of a gentleman." Now, beneath the beech-tree in the forest which touched upon one side the glebe, upon the other his own lands, he chose at this time the good; said to himself, and believed the thing he said, that in word and in deed he would prove himself her friend.
Putting out his hand he drew her down upon the leaves; and she sat beside him, still and happy, ready to answer him when he asked her this or that, readier yet to sit in blissful, dreamy silence.

She was as pure as the flower which she held in her hand, and most innocent in her imaginings.
This was a very perfect knight, a great gentleman, good and pitiful, that had saved her from the Indians when she was a little girl, and had been kind to her,--ah, so kind! In that dreadful night when she had lost father and mother and brother and sister, when in the darkness her childish heart was a stone for terror, he had come, like God, from the mountains, and straightway she was safe.