He wondered what the matter could be.  At first he had been inclined to think that she was poor and was depressed by poverty.  But though she lived very simply, she never seemed to be in difficulties.  Five hundred pounds a year go a long way in the village of Billingsfield.  It was certainly not want of money which made her unhappy.  The interest of the sum represented by the pictures hung in her little sitting-room, not to mention the other objects of value she possessed, would have been alone sufficient to afford her a living.  The squire himself would have given her a high price for these things, but in six months she never in the most distant manner suggested that she wished to part with them.  The idea then naturally suggested itself to Mr. Juxon’s mind that she was still mourning for her husband, and that she would probably continue to mourn for him until some one, himself for instance, succeeded in consoling her for so great a loss.

The conclusion startled the squire.  That was not precisely the part he contemplated playing, nor the species of consolation he proposed to offer.  Mrs. Goddard was indeed a charming woman, and the squire liked charming women and delighted in their society.  But Mr. Juxon was a bachelor of more than forty years standing, and he had never regarded marriage as a thing of itself, for himself, desirable.  He immediately thrust the idea from his mind with a mental “vade retro Satanas!” and determined that things were very agreeable in their present state, and might go on for ever; that if Mrs. Goddard was unhappy that did not prevent her from talking very pleasantly whenever he saw her, which was nearly every day, and that her griefs were emphatically none of his business.  Before very long however Mr. Juxon discovered that though it was a very simple thing to make such a determination it was a very different thing to keep it.  Mrs. Goddard interested him too much.  When he was with her he was perpetually longing to talk about herself instead of about the weather and the garden and the books, and once or twice he was very nearly betrayed into talking about himself, a circumstance so extraordinary that Mr. Juxon imagined he must be either ill or going mad, and thought seriously of sending for the doctor.  He controlled the impulse, however, and temporarily recovered; but strange to say from that time forward the conversation languished when he found himself alone with Mrs. Goddard, and it seemed very hard to maintain their joint interest in the weather, the garden and the books at the proper standard of intensity.  They had grown intimate, and familiarity had begun to breed a contempt of those petty subjects upon which their intimacy had been founded.  It is not clear why this should be so, but it is true, nevertheless, and many a couple before Charles Juxon and Mary Goddard had found it out.  As the interest of two people in each other increases their interest in things, as things, diminishes in like ratio, and they are very certain ultimately to reach that point described by the Frenchman’s maxim—­“a man should never talk to a woman except of herself or himself.”