But Mrs Ogilvie has many more attractions than are to be found in her face. She is a highly educated woman, a first-rate musician and a pleasant and intelligent companion; and more than all, she has a sweet loving disposition, and a true heart at the core of all her little vanities. She is very good to the poor in our village, and often when I am on my rounds, I meet her coming out of some cottage with an empty basket in her hand, which was full when she entered it.
In a quiet little neighbourhood like ours, such a woman cannot fail to be an acquisition, and every one hastens to call on her, and many are the dinners and croquet parties which are inaugurated in her honour. To the former she will not go; she does not wish to go out in the evening during her husband’s absence—much to my wife’s satisfaction, who approves of women being ‘keepers at home’—and it is only seldom that she can be induced to grace one of the croquet parties with her presence.
But when she does, she eclipses every one else. She always dresses in the most exquisite taste, as if anxious that the setting should be worthy of the jewel—the beauty which she prizes so highly. She is always sweet and gracious, and vanquishes the men by her loveliness, the women in spite of it. But she is in no sense of the word a coquette; and the only admirer she favours is our Jack, aged fourteen, who is head-over-ears in love with her, and is ready at any moment to forego cricket for the honour of escorting Mrs Ogilvie through the village, and the privilege of carrying her basket. So the quiet weeks and months glide by, linking us daily more closely together.
She has been settled at the cottage rather more than two years and is beginning to count the weeks to her husband’s return. _We_ do not number them quite so eagerly, for when he comes he will take her away from us, and we shall miss her sorely. It is summer again, a hot damp summer; it has been a very sickly season, and my hands are full.
‘I shall have to get a partner, my dear,’ I say to my wife as I prepare to go out. ‘If this goes on I shall have more to do than I can manage. There is a nasty fever about which I don’t like the look of; and if we don’t have a change for the better in this muggy weather, there is no saying what it may turn to.’