It was Mildred's birthday; she was thirty to-day, and she was smiling to herself at the thoughts that she felt younger and brighter and happier than she had three years before.
They had been such peaceful years, full of congenial work and blessed with sympathetic fellowship; she had sown so poorly, she thought, and had reaped such rich harvests of requited love; she had come amongst them a stranger three years ago, and now she could number friends by the score; even her poorer neighbours loved and trusted her, their northern reserve quite broken down by her tender womanly graces.
'There are two people in Kirkby Stephen that would be sorely missed,' a respectable tradesman once said to Miss Trelawny, 'and they are Miss Lambert and Dr. Heriot, and I don't know which is the greater favourite. I should have lost my wife last year but for her; she sat up with her three nights running when that fever got hold of her.'
And an old woman in the workhouse said once to Dr. Heriot when he wished her to see the vicar:
'Nae thanks to ye, doctor; ye needn't bother yersel' about minister, Miss Lambert has sense enough. I wudn't git mair gude words nir she gi'es; she's terrible gude, bless her;' and many would have echoed old Sally Bates's opinion.
Mildred's downright simplicity and unselfishness were winning all hearts.
'Aunt Milly has such a trustworthy face, people are obliged to tell their troubles when they look at her,' Polly said once, and perhaps the girl held the right clue to the secret of Mildred Lambert's influence.
Real sympathy, that spontaneity of vigorous warm feeling emanating from the sight of others' pain, is rarer than we imagine. Without exactly giving expression to conventional forms of condolence, Mildred conveyed the most delicate sympathy in every look and word; by a rapid transit of emotion, she seemed to place herself in the position of the bereaved; to feel as they felt--the sacred silence of sorrow; her few words never grazed the outer edge of that bitter irritability that trenches on great pain, and so her mere presence seemed to soothe them.
Her perfect unconsciousness added to this feeling; there were times when Mildred's sympathy was so intense that she absolutely lost herself. 'What have I done that you should thank me?' was a common speech with her; in her own opinion she had done absolutely nothing; she had so merged her own individual feelings into the case before her that gratitude was a literal shock to her, and this same simplicity kept her quiet and humble under the growing idolatry of her nephews and nieces.