Their lives made a chasm bridged by threads.
This was not seen by more than two of their acquaintance.

Morna Woodgate had both the observation and the opportunities to see a little how the land lay between them.

Charles Langholm had the experience and the imagination to guess a good deal.

But it was little enough that Morna saw, and Langholm's guesses were as wide of the mark as only the guesses of an imaginative man can be.

As for all the rest--honest Hugh Woodgate, the Venables girls, and their friends the young men in the various works, who saw the old-fashioned courtesy with which Steel always treated his wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for him--they were every one receiving a liberal object lesson in matrimony, as some of them even realized at the time.
"I wish I could learn to treat my wife as Steel does his," sighed the good vicar, once when he had been inattentive at the table, and Morna had rebuked him in fun.