An artist might have had some such poetic fancy, and would certainly have looked lovingly on the alluring colors and forms of decay.  But Miss Greeby was no artist, and prided herself upon being an aggressively matter-of-fact young woman.  With her big boots slapping the ground and her big hands thrust into the pockets of her mannish jacket, she bent her head in a meditative fashion and trudged briskly onward.  What romance her hard nature was capable of, was uppermost now, but it had to do strictly with her personal feelings and did not require the picturesque autumn landscape to improve or help it in any way.  One man’s name suggested romance to bluff, breezy Clara Greeby, and that name was Noel Lambert.  She murmured it over and over again to her heart, and her hard face flushed into something almost like beauty, as she remembered that she would soon behold its owner.  “But he won’t care,” she said aloud, and threw back her head defiantly:  then after a pause, she breathed softly, “But I shall make him care.”

If she hoped to do so, the task was one which required a great amount of skill and a greater amount of womanly courage, neither of which qualities Miss Greeby possessed.  She had no skill in managing a man, as her instincts were insufficiently feminine, and her courage was of a purely rough-and-tumble kind.  She could have endured hunger and thirst and cold:  she could have headed a forlorn hope:  she could have held to a sinking ship:  but she had no store of that peculiar feminine courage which men don’t understand and which women can’t explain, however much they may exhibit it.  Miss Greeby was an excellent comrade, but could not be the beloved of any man, because of the very limitations of semi-masculinity upon which she prided herself.  Noel Lambert wanted a womanly woman, and Lady Agnes was his ideal of what a wife should be.  Miss Greeby had in every possible way offered herself for the post, but Lambert had never cared for her sufficiently to endure the thought of passing through life with her beside him.  He said she was “a good sort”; and when a man says that of a woman, she may be to him a good friend, or even a platonic chum, but she can never be a desirable wife in his eyes.  What Miss Greeby lacked was sex, and lacking that, lacked everything.  It was strange that with her rough common sense she could not grasp this want.  But the thought that Lambert required what she could never give—­namely, the feminine tenderness which strong masculine natures love—­never crossed her very clear and mathematical mind.

So she was bent upon a fool’s errand, as she strode towards the Abbot’s Wood, although she did not know it.  Her aim was to capture Lambert as her husband; and her plan, to accomplish her wish by working on the heart-hunger he most probably felt, owing to the loss of Agnes Pine.  If he loved that lady in a chivalrous fashion—­and Miss Greeby believed that he did—­she was absolutely lost to him as the wife of another man.  Lambert