Walking on the soft, quiet road, he came near the house where he had lately loved to visit, and his eye was arrested by seeing a lantern twinkling in the paddock where Trilium grazed.  He saw the forms of two women moving in its little circle of light; they were digging in the ground.

He felt that he had a right to make sure of the thing he suspected.  The women were not far from a fence by which he could pass, and he did pass that way, looking and looking till a beam of the lantern fell full on the bending faces.  When he saw that Miss Torrance was actually there, he went on without speaking.

After that two facts became known in the village, each much discussed in its own way; yet they were not connected with each other in the common mind.  One was that the young minister had ceased to call frequently upon Miss Torrance; the other, that Trilium, the cow, was giving her milk.

IX

THE GIRL WHO BELIEVED IN THE SAINTS

Marie Verine was a good girl, but she was not beautiful or clever.  She lived with her mother in one flat of an ordinary-looking house in a small Swiss town.  Had they been poorer or richer there might have been something picturesque about their way of life, but, as it was, there was nothing.  Their pleasures were few and simple; yet they were happier than most people are—­but this they did not know.

‘It is a pity we are not richer and have not more friends,’ Madame Verine would remark, ’for then we could perhaps get Marie a husband; as it is, there is no chance.’

Madame Verine usually made this remark to the Russian lady who lived upstairs.  The Russian lady had a name that could not be pronounced; she spoke many languages, and took an interest in everything.  She would reply—­

‘No husband!  It is small loss.  I have seen much of the world.’

Marie had seen little of the world, and she did not believe the Russian lady.  She never said anything about it, except at her prayers, and then she used to ask the saints to pray for her that she might have a husband.

Now, in a village about half a day’s journey from the town where Marie dwelt, there lived a young girl whose name was Celeste.  Her mother had named her thus because her eyes were blue as the sky above, and her face was round as the round moon, and her hair and eyelashes were like sunbeams, or like moonlight when it shines in yellow halo through the curly edges of summer clouds.  The good people of this village were a hard-working, hard-headed set of men and women.  While Celeste’s father lived they had waxed proud about her beauty, for undoubtedly she was a credit to the place; but when her parents died, and left her needy, they said she must go to the town and earn her living.

Celeste laughed in her sleeve when they told her this, because young Fernand, the son of the inn-keeper, had been wooing and winning her heart, in a quiet way, for many a day; and now she believed in him, and felt sure that he would speak his love aloud and take her home to his parents.  To be sure, it was unknown in that country for a man who had money to marry a girl who had none; but Fernand was strong to work and to plan; Celeste knew that he could do what he liked.