reflector; partly to the tiled, square fire-places, and the bold Italian dogs; to the waxed oaken floors, and squares of carpet and loose rugs in place of the conventional Brussels; to a large amount of dark simply-carved wood in one room, and of plain deal, squared, and painted by Miss Fletcher's own hand, in another; to lines of quaint blue pottery; and a general background of flat grey, variously tinted and patterned, against which the bits of rich colour and gold came out with gorgeous yet subdued strength. It was a house of so much evident plan and design that a guiding principle of life seemed the fitting ethical outcome.

The manners too, at the Hollies were as different from the ordinary manners of society as all the rest. When the maid opened the doorno man was kept save for the garden work and to do the rougher jobs of the house-Miss Fletcher smiled to her a friendly greeting, and the girl looked back one as friendly. She was a pretty young person and nicely dressed, without the "flag," and lady-like because happy and refined; and she gave the impression of having supplemented her servanthood with a fine kind of human affectionateness, and of having added self-respect to her code of duty. But she was a girl whom no one in Milltown save Catherine Fletcher would have taken into service at all; a mother and no wife, and drifting fast into ruin when the bountiful Demeter caught her up in her strong hands and cherished her back to happiness and virtue.

"My dear," said Miss Fletcher kindly, "when you lay the table will you set a place for Miss Kemball ?"

The girl looked at the young visitor pleasantly. meant a welcome.

Her manner

"Yes ma'am," she said, and helped her off with her goloshes, as her daughter might; not servilely, but with friendliness.

"Thank you, my dear," said Miss Fletcher; and the girl, gathering up the things, smiled again and said

"I hope you have taken no cold this blustering day. Shall I bring you a cup of tea ?-and the young lady?"

"Well, do so, Mary Anne; it will be refreshing," was the answer. "If you will take your things off now it will be ready for you when you come down," said Mary Anne; "and there is a good fire for you in the drawing-room."

"Thanks," said Miss Fletcher, "we will."

Patricia stared. In her old life she had been kind enough to the servants at the cottage, but she had always been the mistress in her own way. She had perhaps, imbibed a certain sense of discipline from the captain, and she had thought it her duty to keep them up to the mark, and to see that they did not waste, nor gad about, nor slight their work, nor fail in daily godliness of service. For even Patricia had her share, if comparatively a small one, of the hardness charac

VOL. XLI.

X

teristic of virtuous youth. At Abbey Holme the servants were spoken to as if they were intelligent dogs who could understand what was said to them, but of whose sensibilities or self-respect no one need take account; or, if as men, then men eternally in disgrace, with the master and mistress resentful and displeased. Mr. Hamley's manners, always dictatorial, were at times brutal; Mrs. Hamley's were glacial, as if she had been quite recently annoyed; and no one asked, but all commanded service, for which they never returned thanks. But Catherine Fletcher smiled at her maid and spoke kindly, and said "My dear" as to a young girl of her own rank; giving her order in the form of a request; seemingly too secure of her dignity to be afraid of lowering it by the practical confession of human equality. She saw Patricia's look of astonishment, and as they went into her dressing-room, she said laughing, "You were surprised at my calling Mary Anne, 'my dear?'"

"Yes," said Patricia, frankly. "I have never heard a mistress call her servant' dear' before, and it sounded odd. But I like it," she added.

"Do you? It is one of my ways, as the people here say; and I always see when it startles."

"But do not the servants take advantage of it, and become impertinent?" asked Patricia.

"Sometimes; not often. And if they do, what then ?"

Patricia looked straight into Miss Fletcher's face.

"You turn them away, of course," she said.

"No, I do not; I keep them, and try to teach them better," answered the lady; and this time Patricia turned her eyes to the fire and looked perplexed. Keep a servant who had been impertinent! It was a strange doctrine, and it puzzled her.

"Why should I not keep them and try to teach them better?" Miss Fletcher continued. "Think of the difference between us. I am a middle-aged woman, old enough to be their mother, with a better education than they have had; with more experience, more thought; and consequently I ought to have more wisdom and self-control, which is part of wisdom. Do you not think it would be a shame in me if I had not patience with these young creatures, so much more ignorant and undisciplined than myself?"

'Yes, put that way, you are right," said Patricia; "but "- she hesitated.

"But, you would say, they are servants born to obey and take what they can get from their superiors; and that this kind of personal consideration is against the laws of society. I grant it. But, on my side, I say that the way in which mistresses, good women in their own spheres, allow themselves to treat their servants is one of the authorized sins of society; so you see, my dear, between an authorized sin

and my own conscience I choose the latter. right."

And I think I am

"But what should we do if servants were made equal to ourselves ?" said Patricia; "we should have to do our own work."

"Which I do not regard as a terrible hardship, were it to be even so," exclaimed Miss Fletcher; "but it would not be as you say. We should always have servants, that is, helpers; but we should have a higher class-sisters, not slaves; equals whom we should be bound to treat with respect and consideration, and who would do their duties from a higher stand-point than that which they hold now. This habit of disrespect towards servants, which we allow ourselves, does us as much harm as it does them. The greatest curse of slavery lies with the owners, not the owned."

"I wish I was like you," said Patricia impulsively.

"I hope you will be far better," answered her new friend, patting her shoulder kindly. "But come downstairs; I must not make you as sad a democrat as I am myself," she added with a pleasant abruptness; "so let us go down. If we stay much longer Mary Anne's tea will be cold, and she will find that she has given her labour in vain ; always a disheartening thing for a worker."

The conversation during the evening drifted, not without intention, on Patricia's life at Abbey Holme. As there was nothing to be ashamed of in it there was nothing to conceal. Not that the girl entered into details. The great sorrow of her life, how to reconcile humility and truth, and that other grief, how to reconcile love with disapprobation, she left unnoted. Her friendship was too new yet for full confidence. But the Fletchers felt instinctively how sad it all was for her, and how difficult to remedy. In this house of emphatic rule and suppression here was a young creature entirely without guidance, and in all the dangers attendant on spiritual loneliness. Her energies, cramped on the one side, were wasted on the other; her thoughts, becoming active and importunate, were without a centre or an object; her self-education was necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, and there was no one to help her spiritually, intellectually, or morally. If only they might be of use to her-this fine-natured, noble girl, so lost and lonesome now! Yet how could they help her? They knew Mrs. Hamley's jealousy too well to hope that she would give Patricia into any one's hands; while they, specially tainted in her sight with various moral heresies, of which that same servant-question was not the least, were less likely to win her than any other.

Still, if they might have her with them often, they knew they could do much for her. They could teach her how to think as well as what to learn; they could open to her the marvels of science and the treasures of literature; they could take her to nature for her joy and to humanity for her duties. Knowledge and love, knowledge and

good work, knowledge and living out of herself for the benefit of others; yes, the Fletchers knew clearly enough that they could help Reginald Kemball's daughter, and place her in the light if they were allowed. And it pained them both to feel that perhaps this bright, young, ardent soul would be atrophied in the sandy desert of conventional inaction, or stifled in the vapour-bath of luxury and the world, while they who might have led it up to greatness and delight were forbidden.

However, they made the effort. In a few days after this Miss Fletcher wrote up to Mrs. Hamley asking her permission to read German with Patricia. It would be a pleasure to her, and would help the girl who was anxious to learn the language; with pleasant little personal words that were not without their due value. And Mrs. Hamley, because she was angry and discontented with her niece, consented; with the feeling of abandoning Patricia to her own devices, casting her off and cutting her out of the inheritance of love. So Patricia began to read German with Catherine Fletcher, and to have "half-hours with the microscope" with the doctor. And when the lessons were done she went with her new friend into the cottages of the poor, where she saw life as it is without gloss or varnish, and as

she had seen it at Barsands.

This bold strong contact with reality did her good. It strengthened her for the better carrying of her own cross to see the pathetic patience with which the poor bear theirs; and in thinking much of them she forgot to weary herself in trying to find out the cause of her aunt's tempers and her own shortcomings. But when Mrs. Hamley found that her niece" went about with Catherine Fletcher,* as she phrased it, she interposed, and forbade “anything of the kind.” Patricia would be bringing home some horried disease, she said, or something almost worse than disease. She would not have her made "as common" as Catherine Fletcher; she, Patricia, was quite enough inclined as it was to be vulgar and democratic, and everything else undesirable. If she went down to the Hollies-though why she should go at all was a mystery unaccountable to plain people-she must promise not to go into any cottage whatsoever. Such absurdity! What good could she do? and what did she want with dirty children and coarse women? She was far better at home among ladies and gentlemen. And so on; these being the texts on which Mrs. Hamley preached her sermons of reprobation whenever her niece visited her father's old friends.

By degrees, however, she broke up the girl's pleasant intercourse with the Hollies. The German lessons went the way of the cottagevisiting, and though the Fletchers often asked for her, permission to accept their invitations became daily scarcer, and when granted, drew down on her deeper displeasure.

Still Patricia had their counsel when she needed it. She was to do the right thing; there was never any doubt on that score. She was to be patient and to avoid all causes of offence; but when the choice between right and wrong, truth and fair seeming, shameful obedience or noble dissent, came before her, she was to hold by the higher law; and if she had to suffer because of her choice-well! she must suffer, and bear her sorrow bravely.

By principle. There was no tampering with that precept with them. But then it is not always the best thing, they said, to speak all that is in one's mind at all times. The gold of silence has its value; and youth must learn to bear much that is unpleasant with shut lips, patience, and forbearance to oppose. They too counselled self-suppression as Dora had done, but from another stand-point. What was expediency with her was heroism with them; and under their direction Patricia, though not changing a hair's breadth in her own truth and honesty, learnt so much of the wisdom of silence and the generosity of non-condemnation, as to become noticeably less prone to testify, and with fewer angularities of virtue.

Mrs. Hamley said she had grown indifferent and unaffectionate; a state, however, she preferred to her former uncomfortable activity, though preference did not include approbation. But in truth Patricia was unable to please her aunt. She was out of harmony with the central point of the girl's character, and no method of life or action radiating therefrom seemed to be beautiful or fitting.

CHAPTER XVII.

LONG FIELD FARM.

THE country about Milltown had been originally noted for its large number of small holdings, in the days when the backbone of English manliness, and liberty was supposed to exist in her yeomanry and peasant proprietors. In those days small farmers had possessed the greater part of the land; the abbey lands which had been assigned by Henry the Eighth, at the dissolution of the monasteries, to the Lord Bareacres of the period, having been gradually disposed of by the descendants of that famous nobleman, field by field and farm by farm, till the greater part had, as has been said, been parcelled out into small tenements. The nucleus however had been always held together, for the final purpose of coming into the possession of Jabez Hamley, Ledbury's successful office-boy.

The progress of events had gradually changed the land-holding character of Milltown, and a new order of gentlemen owners had dispossessed the old. The change began about ninety years ago, after the great continental wars had enriched certain army contractors, and