short glimpses as it rears its tiny head into the open day.  If the traveller be fresh from an overworked and overworking city, he looks upon what he deems a sheer impossibility—­the residence of men living cheerfully and happily in solitude intense.  The employment of the villagers is in the silent fields, from day to day, from year to year.  Their life has no variety, the general heart has no desire for change.  It was so with their fathers—­so shall it be with their own children, if the too selfish world will let them.  The inhabitants are almost to a man poor, humble, and contented.  The cottages are clean and neat, but lowly, like the owners.  One house, and one alone, is distinguished from the rest; it is aged, and ivy as venerable as itself clings closer there as years roll over it.  It has a lawn, an antique door and porch, narrow windows with the smallest diamond panes, and has been called since its first stone was laid, the Vicarage.  Forget the village, courteous reader, and cross with me the hospitable threshold, for here our history begins—­and ends.

The season is summer—­the time evening—­the hour that of sunset.  The big sun goes down like a ball of fire, crimson-red, leaving at the horizon’s verge his splendid escort—­a host of clouds glittering with a hundred hues, the gorgeous livery of him they have attended.  A borrowed glory steals from them into an open casement, and, passing over, illumines for a time a face pale even to sadness.  It is a woman’s.  She is dressed in deepest mourning, and is—­Heaven be with her in her solitariness!—­a recent widow.  She is thirty years of age at least, and is still adorned with half the beauty of her youth, not injured by the hand of suffering and time.  The expression of the countenance is one of calmness, or, it may be, resignation—­for the tranquility has evidently been taught and learnt as the world’s lesson, and is not native there.  Near her sits a man benign of aspect, advanced in years; his hair and eyebrows white from the winter’s fall; his eye and mien telling of decline, easy and placid as the close of softest music, and nothing harsher.  Care and trouble he has never known; he is too old to learn them now.  His dress is very plain.  The room in which he sits is devoid of ornament, and furnished like the study of a simple scholar.  Books take up the walls.  A table and two chairs are the amount of furniture.  The Vicar has a letter in his hand, which he peruses with attention; and having finished, he turns with a bright smile towards his guest, and tells her she is welcome.

“You are very welcome, madam, for your own sake, and for the sake of him whose signature is here; although, I fear, you will scarcely find amongst us the happiness you look for.  There will be time, however, to consider”—­

“I have considered, sir;” answered the lady, somewhat mournfully.  “My resolution has not been formed in haste, believe me.”

The vicar paused, and reperused the letter.