Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious and helped her mother about all the household things and the village where they lived.

Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was married in London--very strange because she was so serious.

There was a great deal of talk about it at the time.

Millie too was charming.
She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at every one.

At any rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my devotion." As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the countryside for some one to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied, clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer and without a Dulcinea.
"They must have been difficult years," I said, and again cursed myself for my banality.
"They were," he answered very gravely, "Very difficult." "And your other thoughts ?" I asked him.
"They were about death," he replied.