coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the
slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and
parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie
Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran
down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the
cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or so
away. She had met Sir Basil before coming to live there, once or twice in
London, and once or twice for week-ends at country-houses; but he was not a
person whom one came really to know in drawing-room conditions; indeed, at
the country-houses one hardly saw him except at breakfast and dinner; he
was always hunting, golfing, or playing billiards, and in the interludes to
these occupations one found him a trifle somnolent. It was after settling
quite under his wing--and that she was under it she had discovered only
after falling in love with the little white cottage and rushing eagerly
into tenancy--that she had found out what a perfect neighbor he was; then
come to feel him as a near friend; then, as those other friends had termed
it, to care for him.

Valerie Upton, herself, had never called it by any other name, this feeling
about Sir Basil; though it was inevitable, in a woman of her clearness of
vision, that she should very soon recognize a more definite quality in Sir
Basil's feeling about her. That she had always kept him from naming it more
definitely was a feat for which, she well knew it, she could allow herself
some credit. Not only had it needed, at some moments, dexterity; it had
needed, at others, self-control. Self-control, however, was habitual
to her. She had long since schooled herself into the acceptance of her
stupidly maimed life, seeing herself in no pathetic similes at all, but,
rather, as a foolish, unformed creature who, partly through blindness,
partly through recklessness, had managed badly to cripple herself at the
outset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump