Foxglove Manor, Volume I by Robert W. Buchanan

After that first round of visitation Mrs. Haldane and the vicar met very frequently.

She found that she could be of use to a great number of poor people, and the occupation afforded her by her self-imposed duties was novel and interesting. It is pleasant to take the place of Providence, and mete out help and gladness to afflicted humanity. She was actuated by no petty spirit of vanity or ostentation; and though she soon learned that the poorer and more necessitous people are, the more thankless they are as a rule, these disagreeable experiences did not disillusion her. Very often she would leave her carriage at the village inn and accompany Mr. Santley on foot across the fields and down the deep green lanes to the different houses at which he was to call. Their conversations on these occasions were very interesting to her; and more than once as she drove back home in the evening she fell a-thinking of that distant schoolgirl past which Jiad so nearly faded away from her memory, and began to wonder whether, if her family had not so promptly extinguished that little romance of hers, she would now have been the wife of the vicar of Omberley. No word had yet passed between them of that old time, and occasionally she felt just the least curiosity to know how he regarded it. She knew he had not forgotten it, and she smiled to herself as she called to mind the way in which he had addressed her as "Ellen" that first Sunday. She had ever since been only Mrs. Haldane to him. There was a singular fascination about him which she was unable to explain to herself. She remembered his words, his looks his gestures with a curious distinctness.