Violet Lisle — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

3 A VILLAGE LOVE. Her merely physical beauty must have been a iad though it had been soulless; but when to it was added a> nature so pure that it sweetened all the life about her, and so full of hidden depths that one forgot the outer in the inner woman, there resulted a creature so wondrous that she became known only to be worshiped. Even her father, so poor in his rich descent, so proud in > his poverty, so cold and haughty in his self- isolated life, worshiped while he ruled her. As he said himself some-- times in his bitterness his income was not enough to de- cently starve on, but he had always sedulously taken care — that she should never see the grinding side of his pov-- erty. It was asif he would have her life as care-free as if she had belonged to that richer branch of the Lisles who wrote earl and countess with their names, and who had lived as if Melville Lisle had no existence. He would have isolated his peerless daughter from the common herd had he ~been able, but there was such a j oy | in her very living that seemed to draw life to her, an from her childhood she had mixed with the village folk as freely as any low-born maiden among them, and yet there had always been a distance between them only partly of the father’s making. It had been in the very nature of things. ) She could not have been one of them, for with all her frankness and simplicity and gentle humility of soul, there was always that in her which gave to her manner the graciousness of a queen rather than the equality of a comrade. But no one resented it, and everybody loved her. Martin Jenkins, urged on to an avowal of his foélisnnn by the overmastering, devouring love that gave him no peace, would himself have been shocked had he been told by her that she would marry him. He would as soon have thought of being linked to an angel, and yet he could not but ask, as yeoman and squire had tremblingly asked before him. She had never told her father of these offers of mar- riage, for she knew he would look upon them as so many insults to his cherished name and proud blood, and would have fallen into a passion of impotent anger over them. Only Goody White,.once her nurse and now the maid-of- all-work, was her confidante, and that dear old soul, even while she had the disdaim of the father for ali low-born suitors, was nevertheless delighted with each new offer- ing laid at the shrine of her darling. (EO) eh oes com