Johnny Ludlow, Third Series

III.

“Mother, I think I shall go to college this morning.”

So spoke Dolly at the breakfast-table one Sunday in July. The sun was shining in at the open window, the birds were singing.

“It’s my belief, Dolly, you would go off to college every Sunday of your life, if you had your way,” said Mrs. Grape.

Dolly laughed. “And so I would, mother.”

For the beautiful cathedral service had charms for Dolly. Islip Church was a very primitive church, the good old clergyman was toothless, the singing of the two psalms was led off by the clerk in a cracked bass voice; there was no organ. Accustomed to nothing better than this, the first time Dolly found herself at the cathedral, after their removal to Worcester, and the magnificent services burst upon her astonished senses, she thought she must have ascended to some celestial sphere. The fine edifice, the musical chanting of the prayers by the minor canons, the singing of the numerous choir, men and boys in their white surplices, the deep tones of the swelling organ, the array of white-robed prebendaries, the dignified and venerable bishop—Cornwall—in his wig and lawn sleeves, the state, the ceremony of the whole, and the glittering colours of the famed east window in the distance; all this laid hold of Dolly’s senses for ever. She and her mother attended St. Martin’s Church generally, but Dolly would now and then lure her mother to the cathedral. Latterly Mrs. Grape had been ailing and did not go anywhere.

“If you could but go to college to-day, mother!” went on Dolly.

“Why!”

“Mr. Benson preaches. I met Miss Stafford yesterday afternoon, and she told me Mr. Benson had come into residence. The Herald said so too.”

“Then you must go betimes if you would secure a seat,” remarked Mrs. Grape. “And mind you don’t get your new muslin skirt torn.”

So Dolly put on her new muslin, and her bonnet, and started.

When the Reverend Christopher Benson, Master of the Temple, became one of the prebendaries of Worcester, his fame as a preacher flew to all parts of the town. You should hear the Squire’s account of the crush in getting into the cathedral on the Sundays that he was in residence: four Sundays in the year; or five, as the case might be; all told. Members of other churches, Dissenters of different sects, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and people who never went anywhere at other times, scrupled not to run to hear Mr. Benson. For reading like unto his, or preaching like unto his, had rarely been heard in that cathedral or in any other. Though it might be only the Gospel that fell to his share in the communion service, the crowd listened, enraptured, to his sweet, melodious tones. The college doors were besieged before the hour for opening them; it was like going into a theatre.

Dolly, on this day, made one in the crowd at the cloister entrance; she was pushed here and there; and although she hurried well with the rest as soon as the doors were unlocked, every seat was taken when she reached the chancel. She found standing room opposite the pulpit, near King John’s tomb, and felt very hot in the crush.

“Is it always like this, here?”

The whispered words came from a voice at her side. Dolly turned, and saw a tall, fine-looking, well-dressed man about thirty, with a green silk umbrella in his hand.

“No,” she whispered back again. “Only for four or five Sundays, at this time of the year, when Mr. Benson preaches.”

“Indeed,” said the stranger. “His preaching ought to be something extraordinary to attract such a crowd as this.”

“And so it is,” breathed Dolly. “And his reading—oh, you never heard any reading like it.”

“Very eloquent, I suppose?”

“I don’t know whether it may be called eloquence,” debated Dolly, remembering that a chance preacher she once heard, who thumped the cushions with his hands and shook the air with his voice, was said to be eloquent. “Mr. Benson is the quietest preacher and reader I ever listened to.”

The stranger seemed to be a kind sort of man. During the stir made by the clergy, preceded by the six black-robed, bowing bedesmen, going up to the communion-table, he found an inch of room on a bench, and secured it for Dolly. She thanked him gratefully.

Mr. Benson’s sermon came to an end, the bishop gave the blessing from his throne, and the crowd poured out. Dolly, by way of a change, made her exit from the great north entrance. The brightness of the day had changed; a sharp shower was falling.

“Oh dear! My new muslin will be wet through!” thought Dolly. “This parasol’s of no use.”

“Will you allow me to offer you my umbrella—or permit me to hold it over you?” spoke the stranger, who must have followed her out. And Dolly hesitated and flushed, and did not know whether she ought to say yes or no.

He held the umbrella over Dolly, letting his own coat get wet. The shower ceased presently; but he walked on by her side to her mother’s door, and then departed with a bow fit for an emperor.

“What a polite man!” thought Dolly. “Quite a gentleman.” And she mentioned the occurrence to her mother; who seemed to-day more poorly than usual.

They sat at the open window in the afternoon, and Dolly read aloud the evening psalms. It was the fifth day of the month. As Dolly finished the last verse and closed the book, Mrs. Grape, after a moment’s silence, repeated the words:—

“The Lord shall give strength unto His people: the Lord shall give His people the blessing of peace.”

“What a beautiful promise that is, Dolly!” she said in hushed tones. “Peace! Ah, my dear, no one can know what that word means until they have been sorely tried. Peace everlasting!”

Mrs. Grape leaned back in her chair, gazing upwards. The sky was of a deep blue; a brilliant gold cloud, of peculiar shape, was moving slowly across it just overhead.

“One could almost fancy it to be God’s golden throne in the brighter land,” she murmured. “My child, do you know, the thought comes across me at times that it may not be long before I am there. And I am getting to long for it.”

“Don’t say that, mother,” cried the startled girl.

“Well, well, dear, I don’t want to frighten you. It is all as God pleases.”

“I shall send to ask Mr. Nash to come to see you to-morrow, mother. Do you feel worse?”

Mrs. Grape slightly shook her head. Presently she spoke.

“Is it not almost teatime, Dolly?—whoever is that?”

A gentleman, passing, with a red rose in his button-hole and silk umbrella in his hand, was taking off his hat to Dolly. Dolly’s face turned red as the rose as she returned the bow, and whispered to her mother that it was the polite stranger. He halted to express a hope that the young lady had not taken cold from the morning shower.

He turned out to be a Mr. Mapping, a traveller in the wine trade for some London house. But, when he was stating this to Mrs. Grape during the first visit paid her (for he contrived to make good his entrance to the house), he added in a careless, off-hand manner, that he was thankful to say he had good private means and was not dependent upon his occupation. He lingered on in Worcester, and became intimate with the Grapes.

Events thickened. Before the next month, August, came in, Mrs. Grape died. Dolly was stunned; but she would have felt the blow even more keenly than she did feel it had she not fallen over head and ears in love with Alick Mapping. About three hundred pounds, all her mother’s savings, came to Dolly; excepting that, and the furniture, she was unprovided for.

“You cannot live upon that: what’s a poor three hundred pounds?” spoke Mr. Mapping a day or two after the funeral, his tone full of tender compassion.

“How rich he must be himself!” thought poor Dolly.

“You will have to let me take care of you, child.”

“Oh dear!” murmured Dolly.

“We had better be married without delay. Once you are my wife——”

“Please don’t go on!” interposed Dolly in a burst of sobs. “My dear mother is hardly buried.”

“But what are you to do?” he gently asked. “You will not like to live here alone—and you have no income to live here upon. Your business is worth nothing as yet; it would not keep you in gloves. If I speak of these things prematurely, Dolly, it is for your sake.”

Dolly sobbed. The future looked rather desolate.

“You have promised to be my wife, Dolly: remember that.”

“Oh, please don’t talk of it yet awhile!” sobbed Dolly.

“Leave you here alone I will not; you are not old enough to take care of yourself; you must have a protector. I will take you with me to London, where you will have a good home and be happy as a cricket: but you must know, Dolly, that I cannot do that until we are married. All sensible people must say that you will be quite justified under the circumstances.”

Mr. Alick Mapping had a wily tongue, and Dolly was persuaded to listen. The marriage was fixed for the first week in September, and the banns were put up at St. Martin’s Church; which, as every one knows, stands in the corn-market. Until then, Mr. Mapping returned to London; to make, as he told Dolly, preparations for his bride. An acquaintance of Mrs. Grape’s, who had been staying with Dolly since the death, would remain with her to the last. As soon as Dolly was gone, the furniture would be sold by Mr. Stretch, the auctioneer, and the proceeds transmitted to Dolly in London. Mrs. Grape had given all she possessed to Dolly, in the fixed and firm belief that her son was really no more.

But all this was not to be put in practice without a warning from their neighbour, the Quaker lady; she sent for Dolly, being confined to her own chamber by illness.

“Thee should not be in this haste, Dorothy,” she began. “It is not altogether seemly, child, and it may not be well for thee hereafter. Thee art too young to marry; thee should wait a year or two——”

“But I am not able to wait,” pleaded poor Dolly, with tears in her eyes. “How could I continue to live alone in the house—all by myself?”

“Nay, but thee need not have done that. Some one of discreet age would have been glad to come and share expenses with thee. I might have helped thee to a suitable person myself: a cousin of mine, an agreeable and kindly woman, would like to live up this way. But the chief objection that I see to this hasty union, Dorothy,” continued Miss Deavor, “is that thee knows next to nothing about the young man.”

Dolly opened her eyes in surprise. “Why, I know him quite well, dear Miss Rachel. He has told me all about himself.”

“That I grant thee. Elizabeth informs me that thee has had a good account from himself as to his means and respectability. But thee has not verified it.”

“Verified it!” repeated Dolly.

“Thee has not taken steps to ascertain that the account he gives is true. How does thee know it to be so?”

Dolly’s face flushed. “As if he would deceive me! You do not know him, Miss Deavor.”

“Nay, child, I wish not to cast undeserved aspersion on him. But thee should ask for proof that what he tells thee is correct. Before thee ties thyself to him for life, Dorothy, thee will do well to get some friend to make inquiries in London. It is my best advice to thee, child; and it is what Mary Ann Grape, thy mother, would have done before giving thee to him.”

Dolly thanked Miss Deavor and went away. The advice was well meant, of course; she felt that; but quite needless. Suspect Alick Mapping of deceit! Dolly would rather have suspected herself. And she did nothing.

The morning of the wedding-day arrived in due course. Dolly was attiring herself for the ceremony in a pretty new grey gown, her straw bonnet trimmed with white satin lying on the bed (to resume her black on the morrow), when Elizabeth Deavor came in.

“I have something to say to thee, Dolly,” she began, in a grave tone. “I hardly knew whether to speak to thee or not, feeling not altogether sure of the thing myself, so I asked Aunt Rachel, and she thinks thee ought to be told.”

“What is it?” cried Dolly.

“I think I saw thy brother Tom last night.”

The words gave Dolly a curious shock. She fell back in a chair.

“I will relate it to thee,” said Elizabeth. “Last evening I was at Aunt Rachel’s window above-stairs, when I saw a boy in dark clothes standing on the pavement outside, just opposite thy gate. It was a bright night, as thee knows. He had his arms folded and stood quite still, gazing at this house. The moonlight shone on his face and I thought how much it was like poor lost Tom’s. He still stood on; so I went downstairs and stepped to our gate, to ask whether he was in want of any one: and then, Dolly, I felt queerer than I ever felt in my life, for I saw that it was Tom. At least, I thought so.”

“Did he speak?” gasped Dolly.

“He neither spoke nor answered me: he turned off, and went quickly down the road. I think it was Tom; I do indeed.”

“What am I to do?” cried Dolly. “Oh, if I could but find him!”

“There’s nothing to do, that we can see,” answered the young Quakeress. “I have talked it over with Aunt Rachel. It would appear as though he did not care to show himself: else, if it were truly thy brother, why did he not come in? I will look out for him every night and speak to him if he appears again. I promise thee that, Dolly.”

“Why do you say ‘appears,’ Elizabeth?” cried the girl. “You think it was himself, do you not; not his—his spirit?”

“Truly, I can but conclude it was himself.”

Dolly, in a state of bewilderment, what with one thing and another, was married to Alick Mapping in St. Martin’s Church, by its white-haired Rector, Digby Smith. A yellow post-chaise waited at the church-gates and carried them to Tewkesbury. The following day they went on by coach to Gloucester, where Mr. Mapping intended to stay a few days before proceeding to London.

They took up their quarters at a comfortable country inn on the outskirts of the town. On the second day after their arrival, Dolly, about to take a country walk with her husband, ran downstairs from putting her bonnet on, and could not see him. The barmaid told her he had gone into the town to post a letter, and asked Dolly to step into the bar-parlour to wait.

It was a room chiefly used by commercial travellers. Dolly’s attention was caught by something over the mantelpiece. In a small glass-case, locked, there was the portrait of a man cleverly done in pencil; by its side hung a plain silver watch with a seal and key attached to a short black ribbon: and over all was a visiting-card, inscribed in ink, “Mr. Gardner.” Dolly looked at this and turned sick and faint: it was her father’s likeness, her father’s watch, seal, and ribbon. Of an excitable nature, she burst into tears, and the barmaid ran in. There and then, the mystery so long hanging about Robert Grape’s fate was cleared up, so far as it ever would be in this world.

He had left Bridgenorth, as may be remembered, on the Thursday morning. Towards the evening of the following day, Friday, as Dolly now heard, he appeared at this very inn. This same barmaid, an obliging, neat, and modest young woman, presenting a rare contrast to the barmaids of the present day, saw him come in. His face had a peculiar, grey shade upon it, which attracted her notice, and she asked him if he felt ill. He answered that he felt pretty well then, but supposed he must have had a fainting-fit when walking into the town, for to his surprise he found himself on the grass by the roadside, waking up from a sort of stupor. He engaged a bedroom for the night, and she thought he said—but she had never been quite sure—that he had come to look out for a horse at the fair to be held in Gloucester the next day. He took no supper, “not feeling up to it,” he said, but drank a glass of weak brandy-and-water, and ate a biscuit with it, before going up to bed. The next morning he was found dead; had apparently died quietly in his sleep. An inquest was held, and the medical men testified that he had died of heart disease. Poor Dolly, listening to this, wondered whether the pitch out of the gig at Bridgenorth had fatally injured him.

“We supposed him to be a Mr. Gardner,” continued the barmaid, “as that card”—pointing to it—“was found in his pocket-book. But we had no clue as to who he was or whence he came. His stockings were marked with a ‘G’ in red cotton; and there was a little loose money in his pocket and a bank-note in his pocket-book, just enough to pay the expenses of the funeral.”

“But that likeness,” said Dolly. “How did you come by it? Who took it?”

“Ah, ma’am, it was a curious thing, that—but such things do not happen by chance. An idle young man of the town used to frequent our inn; he was clever at drawing, and would take off a likeness of any one near him with a few strokes of a pen or pencil in a minute or two, quite surreptitious like and for his own amusement. Wonderful likenesses they were. He was in the bar-parlour, this very room, ma’am, while the stranger was drinking his brandy-and-water, and he dashed off this likeness.”

“It is exactly like,” said poor Dolly. “But his name was Grape, not Gardner. It must have been the card of some acquaintance.”

“When nobody came forward to identify the stranger, the landlord got the sketch given up to him,” continued the young woman. “He put it in this case with the watch and seal and card, and hung it where you see, hoping that sometime or other it might be recognized.”

“But did you not let it be known abroad that he had died?” sighed Dolly.

“Why, of course we did; and put an advertisement in the Gloucester papers to ask if any Mr. Gardner was missing from his friends. Perhaps the name, not being his, served to mislead people. That’s how it was, ma’am.”

So that the one disappearance, that of Robert Grape, was now set at rest.

THE STORY OF DOROTHY GRAPE.

IN AFTER YEARS.

I.

We found her out through Mr. Brandon’s nephew, Roger Bevere, a medical student, who gave his people trouble, and one day got his arm and head broken. Mr. Brandon and the Squire were staying in London at the Tavistock Hotel. I, Johnny Ludlow, was also in London, visiting Miss Deveen. News of the accident was brought to Mr. Brandon; the young man had been carried into No. 60, Gibraltar Terrace, Islington, and a doctor named Pitt was attending him.

We went to see him at once. A narrow, quiet street, as I recollected well, this Gibraltar Terrace, the dwellings it contained facing each other, thirty in a row. No. 60 proved to be the same house to which we had gone once before, when inquiring about the illness of Francis Radcliffe, and Pitt was the same doctor. It was the same landlady also; I knew her as soon as she opened the door; a slender, faded woman, long past middle life, with a pink flush on her thin cheeks, and something of the lady about her.

“What an odd thing, Johnny!” whispered the Squire, recognizing the landlady as well as the house. “Mapping, I remember her name was.”

Mr. Brandon went upstairs to his nephew. We were shown by her into the small parlour, which looked as faded as it had looked on our last visit, years before: as faded as she was. While relating to us how young Bevere’s accident occurred, she had to run away at a call from upstairs.

“Looks uncommonly careworn, doesn’t she, Johnny!” remarked the Squire. “Seems a nice sort of person, though.”

“Yes, sir. I like her. Does it strike you that her voice has a home-ring in it? I think she must be from Worcestershire.”

“A home-ring—Worcestershire!” retorted he. “It wouldn’t be you, Johnny, if you did not get up some fancy or other. Here she comes! You are not from Worcestershire, are you, ma’am?” cried the Squire, going to the root of the question at once, in his haste to convict my fancy of its sins.

“Yes, I am, sir,” she replied; and I saw the pink flush on her cheeks deepen to crimson. “I knew you, sir, when I was a young girl, many years ago. Though I should not have recognized you when you were last here, but that you left your card. We lived at Islip, sir; at that pretty cottage with the yellow roses round the porch. You must remember Dolly Grape.”

“But you are not Dolly Grape!” returned the Squire, pushing up his spectacles.

“Yes, sir, I was Dolly Grape. Your mother knew us well; so did you.”

“Goodness bless my heart!” softly cried the Squire, gazing at her as if the news were too much for him. And then, starting up impulsively, he grasped her hand and gave it a hearty shake. A sob seemed to take her throat. The Squire sat back again, and went on staring at her.

“My father disappeared mysteriously on one of his journeys; you may remember us by that, sir.”

“To be sure I remember it—Robert Grape!” assented the Squire. “Had to do with the post-horse duty. Got as far as Bridgenorth, and was never heard of again. And it is really you—Dolly Grape! And you are living here—letting lodgings! I’m afraid the world has not been overkind to you.”

She shook her head; tears were running down her faded cheeks.

“No, it has not, sir,” she answered, as she wiped them away with her handkerchief. “I have had nothing but ups and downs in life since leaving Worcester: sad misfortunes: sometimes, I think, more than my share. Perhaps you heard that I married, sir—one Mr. Mapping?”

The Squire nodded slightly. He was too busy gazing at her to pay attention to much else.

“I am looking at you to see if I can trace the old features of the old days,” he said, “and I do now; they grow upon my memory; though you were but a slip of a girl when I used to see you. I wonder I did not recognize you at first.”

“And I wonder that you can even recognize me now, sir,” she returned: “trouble and grief have so much altered me. I am getting old, too.”

“Have you lived in this house long?”

“Nearly ten years, sir. I live by letting my rooms.”

The Squire’s voice took a tone of compassion.

“It can’t be much of a living, once the rent and taxes are paid.”

Mrs. Mapping’s mild blue eyes, that seemed to the Squire to be of a lighter tinge than of yore, wore a passing sadness. Any one able to read it correctly might have seen she had her struggles.

“Are you a widow?”

“I—call myself one, sir,” she replied, with hesitation.

“Call yourself one!” retorted the Squire, for he liked people to be straightforward in their speech. “My good woman, you are a widow, or you are not one.”

“I pass for one, sir.”

“Now, what on earth do you mean?” demanded he. “Is your husband—Mapping—not dead?”

“He was not dead when I last heard of him, sir; that’s a long while ago. But he is not my husband.”

“Not your husband!” echoed the Squire, pushing up his spectacles again. “Have you and he quarrelled and parted?”

Any countenance more pitifully sad than Mrs. Mapping’s was at that moment, I never wish to see. She stood smoothing down her black silk apron (which had a slit in it) with trembling fingers.

“My history is a very painful one,” she said at last in a low voice. “I will tell it if you wish; but not this morning. I should like to tell it you, sir. It is some time since I saw a home-face, and I have often pictured to myself some kind friendly face of those old happy days looking at me while I told it. Different days from these.”

“These cannot be much to boast of,” repeated the Squire. “It must be a precarious sort of living.”

“Of course it fluctuates,” she said. “Sometimes my rooms are full, at other times empty. One has to put the one against the other and strive to tide over the hard days. Mr. Pitt is very good to me in recommending the rooms to medical students; he is a good-natured man.”

“Oh, indeed! Listen to that, Johnny! Pitt good-natured! Rather a loose man, though, I fancy, ma’am.”

“What, Mr. Pitt? Sir, I don’t think so. He has a surgery close by, and gets a good bit of practice——”

The rest was interrupted by Mr. Pitt himself; he came to say we might go up to Mr. Brandon in the sick-room. We had reason to think ill enough of Pitt in regard to the Radcliffe business; but the Squire could not tackle him about the past offhand, this not being just the time or place for it. Later, when he did so, it was found that we had been misjudging the man. Pitt had not joined Stephen Radcliffe in any conspiracy; and the false letter, telling of Frank’s death at Dr. Dale’s, had not been written by him. So we saw that it must have been concocted by Stephen himself.

“Any way, if I did write such a letter, I retained no consciousness of it afterwards,” added Pitt, with candour. “I am sorry to say, Mr. Todhetley, that I gave way to drink at that time, and I know I was often not myself. But I do not think it likely that I wrote it; and as to joining Mr. Radcliffe in any conspiracy against his brother, why, I would not do such a thing, drunk or sober, and I never knew it had been done.”

“You have had the sense to pull up,” cried the Squire, in reference to what Pitt had admitted.

“Yes,” answered Pitt, in a voice hardly above a whisper. “And I never think of what I might have become by this time, but for pulling up, but I thank God.”

These allusions, however, may perhaps only puzzle the reader. And it is not with Mr. Pitt, his virtues or his failings, that this paper concerns itself, but with the history of Dorothy Grape.

We must take it up from the time Dorothy arrived in London with her husband, Alick Mapping, after their marriage at Worcester, as already narrated. The sum of three hundred pounds, owned by Dolly, passed into Mr. Mapping’s possession on the wedding-day, for she never suggested such a thing as that it should be settled on herself. The proceeds, arising from the sale of the furniture, were also transmitted to him later by the auctioneer. Thus he had become the proprietor of Dolly, and of all her worldly goods. After that, he and she faded out of Worcestershire memory, and from the sight of Worcestershire people—except for one brief meeting, to be mentioned presently.

The home in London, to which her husband conveyed her, and of which he had boasted, Dolly found to be lodgings. Lodgings recently engaged by him, a sitting-room and bedroom, in the Blackfriars Road. They were over a shop, kept by one Mrs. Turk, who was their landlady. “I would not fix upon a house, dear, without you,” he said; and Dolly thanked him gratefully. All he did was right to her.

She was, as he had told her she would be, happy as a cricket, though bewildered with the noisy bustle of the great town, and hardly daring to venture alone into its busy streets, more crowded than was Worcester Cathedral on the Sundays Mr. Benson preached. The curious elucidation at Gloucester of what her father’s fate had been was a relief to her mind, rather than the contrary, once she had got over its sadness; though the still more curious doubt about her brother Tom, whispered to her by Elizabeth Deavor on her wedding morning, was rarely absent from her thoughts. But Dolly was young, Dolly was in love, and Dolly was intensely happy. Her husband took her to the theatres, to Vauxhall, and to other places of amusement; and Dolly began to think life was going to be a happy valley into which care would never penetrate.

This happy state of things changed. Mr. Mapping took to be a great deal away from home, sometimes for weeks together. He laid the fault upon his business; travellers in the wine trade had to go all over England, he said. Dolly was not unreasonable and accepted the explanation cheerfully.

But something else happened now and then that was less satisfactory. Mr. Mapping would appear at home in a condition that frightened Dolly: as if he had made the mistake of tasting the wine samples himself, instead of carrying them to his customers. Never having been brought into contact with anything of the kind in her own home, she regarded it with terror and dismay.

Then another phase of discomfort set in: money seemed to grow short. Dolly could not get from her husband what was needed for their moderate expenses; which were next to nothing when he was away from home. She cried a little one day when she wanted some badly and he told her he had none to give her. Upon which Mr. Mapping turned cross. There was no need of tears, he said: it would all come right if she did not bother. Dolly, in her secret heart, hoped he would not have to break in upon what he called their “nest-egg,” that three hundred pounds in the bank. A nest-egg which, as he had more than once assured her, it was his intention to keep intact.

Only in one thing had Mr. Mapping been arbitrary: he would not allow her to hold any communication with Worcester. When they first came to London, he forbade Dolly to write to any of her former friends, or to give them her address. “You have no relatives there,” he said, “only a few acquaintances, and I would prefer, Dolly, that you dropped them altogether.” Of course she obeyed him: though it prevented her writing to ask Elizabeth Deavor whether she had again seen Tom.

Things, despite Mr. Mapping’s assurances, did not come right. As the spring advanced, his absences became more marked and the money less plentiful. Dolly shed many tears. She knew not what to do; for, as the old song says, not e’en love can live on flowers. It was a very favourite song of Dolly’s, and her tuneful voice might often be heard trilling it through from beginning to end as she sat at work.

Dolly’s love did not fly away, though the ugly witch, Poverty, was certainly showing herself. Mrs. Turk grew uneasy. Dolly assured her there was no occasion for that; that if the worst came to the worst, they must break into the “nest-egg” which they had lying by in the Bank of England—the three hundred pounds left her by her mother.

One bright day in May, Dolly, pining for the outdoor sunshine, betook herself to Hyde Park, a penny roll in her pocket for her dinner. The sun glittered in the blue sky, the air was warm, the birds chirped in the trees and hopped on the green grass. Dolly sat on a bench enjoying the sweetness and tranquillity, thinking how very delightful life might be when no evil stepped in to mar it.

Two Quakeress ladies approached arm-in-arm, talking busily. Dolly started up with a cry: for the younger one was Elizabeth Deavor. She had come to London with a friend for the May meetings. The two girls were delighted to see each other, but Elizabeth was pressed for time.

“Why did thee never write to me, Dorothy? I had but one letter from thee, written at Gloucester, telling me, thee knows, all about thy poor father.” And, to this question, Dolly murmured some lame excuse.

“I wanted to write to thee, but I had not thy address. I promised thee I would look out for Tom—”

“And have you seen him again?” interrupted Dolly in excitement. “Oh, Elizabeth?”

“I have seen the boy again, but it was not Tom: and I am very sorry that my fancy misled me and caused me to excite thy hopes. It was only recently, in Fourth month. I saw the same boy standing in the same place before thy old gate, his arms folded, and looking at the house as before, in the moonlight. I ran out, and caught his arm, and held it while he told me who he was and why he came there. It was not thy brother, Dorothy, but the likeness to him is marvellous.”

“No!—not he?” gasped Dolly, woefully disappointed.

“It is one Richard East,” said Elizabeth; “a young sailor. He lived with his mother in that house before she died, when he was a little boy; and when he comes home from a voyage now, and is staying with his friends in Melcheapen Street, he likes to go up there and have a good look at it. This is all. As I say, I am sorry to have misled thee. We think there cannot be a doubt that poor Tom really lost his life that night in the canal. And art thee nicely, Dorothy?—and is thy husband well? Thee art looking thin. Fare thee well.”

Summer passed, Dolly hardly knew how. She was often reduced to straits, often and often went dinnerless. Mrs. Turk only had a portion of what was due to her by fits and starts. Mr. Mapping himself made light of troubles; they did not seem to touch him much; he was always in spirits and always well dressed.

“Alick, you should draw a little of that money in the bank,” his wife ventured to suggest one day when Mrs. Turk had been rather troublesome. “We cannot go on like this.”

“Break in upon our ‘nest-egg!’” he answered. “Not if I know it, Dolly. Mrs. Turk must wait.”

A little circumstance was to happen that gave some puzzle to Dolly. She had been married about fourteen months, and her husband was, as she believed, on his travels in Yorkshire, when Lord-Mayor’s day occurred. Mrs. Gurk, a good woman in the main, and compassionating the loneliness of the young wife, offered to take her to see the show, having been invited to an upper window of a house in Cheapside. Of all the sights in the world that Dolly had heard of, she quite believed that must be the greatest, and felt delighted. They went, took up their station at the window, and the show passed. If it had not quite come up to Dolly’s expectation, she did not say so.

“A grand procession, is it not, Mrs. Mapping?” cried her companion, gazing after it with admiring eyes.

“Very,” said Dolly. “I wonder—Good gracious!” she broke off, with startling emphasis, “there’s my husband!”

“Where?” asked Mrs. Turk, her eyes bent on the surging crowd below.

“There,” said Dolly, pointing with her finger; “there! He is arm-in-arm with two others; in the middle of them. How very strange! It was only yesterday I had a letter from him from Bradford, saying he should be detained there for some time to come. How I wish he had looked up at this window!”

Mrs. Turk’s sight had failed to single him out amongst the moving crowd. And as Mr. Mapping did not make his appearance at home that evening, or for many evenings to come, she concluded that the young wife must have been mistaken.

When Mr. Mapping did appear, he said the same, telling Dolly she must have “seen double,” for that he had not been in London. Dolly did not insist, but she felt staggered and uncomfortable; she felt certain it was her husband she saw.

How long the climax would have been postponed, or in what way it might have disclosed itself, but for something that occurred, cannot be conjectured. This wretched kind of life went on until the next spring. Dolly was reduced to perplexity. She had parted with all the pretty trinkets her mother left her; she would live for days together upon bread-and-butter and tears: and a most unhappy suspicion had instilled itself into her mind—that the nest-egg no longer existed. But even yet she found excuses for her husband; she thought that all doubt might still be explained away. Mrs. Turk was very good, and did not worry; Dolly did some plain sewing for her, and made her a gown or two.

On one of these spring days, when the sun was shining brightly on the pavement outside, Dolly went out on an errand. She had not gone many steps from the door when a lady, very plainly dressed, came up and accosted her quietly.

“Young woman, I wish to ask why you have stolen away my husband?”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the startled Dolly. “What do you mean?”

“You call yourself Mrs. Mapping.”

“I am Mrs. Mapping.”

The stranger shook her head. “We cannot converse here,” she said. “Allow me to go up to your room”—pointing to it. “I know you lodge there.”

“But what is it that you want with me?” objected Dolly, who did not like all this.

“You think yourself the wife of Alick Mapping. You think you were married to him.”

Dolly wondered whether the speaker had escaped from that neighbouring stronghold, Bedlam. “I don’t know what it is you wish to insinuate,” she said. “I was married to Mr. Mapping at St. Martin’s Church in Worcester, more than eighteen months ago.”

“Ay! But I, his wife, was married to him in London seven years ago. Yours was no marriage; he deceived you.”

Dolly’s face was turning all manner of colours. She felt frightened almost to death.

“Take me to your room and I will tell you all that you need to know. Do not fear I shall reproach you; I am only sorry for you; it has been no fault of yours. He is a finished deceiver, as I have learnt to my cost.”

Dolly led the way. Seated together, face to face, her eyes strained on the stranger’s, she listened to the woeful tale, which was gently told. That it was true she could not doubt. Alick Mapping had married her at St. Martin’s Church in Worcester, but he had married this young woman some years before it.

“You are thinking that I look older than my husband,” said she, misinterpreting Dolly’s gaze. “That is true. I am five years older, and am now approaching my fortieth year. He pretended to fall in love with me; I thought he did; but what he really fell in love with was my money.”

“How did you come to know about me?—how did you find it out?” gasped Dolly.

“It was through Mrs. Turk, your landlady,” answered the true wife. “She has been suspecting that something or other was wrong, and she talked of it to a friend of hers who chances to know my family. This friend was struck with the similarity of name—the Alick Mapping whose wife was here in the Blackfriars Road, and the Alick Mapping whose wife lived at Hackney.”

“How long is it since he left you?” asked poor Dolly.

“He has not left me. He has absented himself inexplicably at times for a year or two past, but he is still with me. He is at home now, at this present moment. I have a good home, you must understand, and a good income, which he cannot touch; he would think twice before giving up that. Had you money?” continued the lady abruptly.

“I had three hundred pounds. He told me he had placed it in the Bank of England; I think he did do that; and that he should never draw upon it, but leave it there for a nest-egg.”

Mrs. Mapping smiled in pity. “You may rely upon it that there’s not a shilling left of it. Money in his hands, when he can get hold of any, runs out of them like water.”

“Is it true that he travels for a wine house?”

“Yes—and no. It is his occupation, but he is continually throwing up his situations: pleasure has more attraction for him than work; and he will be a gentleman at large for months together. Yet not a more clever man of business exists than he is known to be, and he can get a place at any time.”

“Have you any children?” whispered Dolly.

“No. Shall you prosecute him?” continued the first wife, after a pause.

“Shall I—what?” cried Dolly, aghast.

“Prosecute him for the fraud he has committed on you?”

“Oh dear! the exposure would kill me,” shivered the unhappy girl. “I shall only hope to run away and hide myself forever.”

“Every syllable I have told you is truth,” said the stranger, producing a slip of paper as she rose to depart. “Here are two or three references by which you can verify it, if you doubt me. Mrs. Turk will do it for you if you do not care to stir in it yourself. Will you shake hands with me?”

Dolly assented, and burst into a whirlwind of tears.

Nothing seemed to be left for her, as she said, but to run away and hide herself. All the money was gone, and she was left penniless and helpless. By the aid of Mrs. Turk, who proved a good friend to her, she obtained a situation in a small preparatory school near Croydon, as needle-woman and companion to the mistress. She called herself Mrs. Mapping still, and continued to wear her wedding-ring; she did not know what else to do. She had been married; truly, as she had believed; and what had come of it was surely no fault of hers.

A little good fortune fell to her in time; a little bit. For years and years she remained in that school at Croydon, until, as it seemed to herself, she was middle-aged, and then the mistress of it died. Having no relatives, she left her savings and her furniture to Dolly. With the money Dolly set up the house in Gibraltar Terrace, put the furniture into it, and began to let lodgings. A young woman, who had been teacher in the school, and whom Dolly regarded as her sister, and often called her so, removed to it with her and stayed with her until she married.

Those particulars—which we listened to one evening from her own lips—were gloomy enough. The Squire went into an explosion over Alick Mapping.

“The despicable villain! What has become of him?”

“I never saw him after his wife came to me,” she answered, “but Mrs. Turk would get news of him now and then. Since Mrs. Turk’s death, I have heard nothing. Sometimes I think he may be dead.”

“I hope he was hung!” flashed the Squire.

Well—to hasten on. That was Dorothy Grape’s history since she left Worcester; and a cruel one it was!

We saw her once or twice again before quitting London. And the Squire left a substantial present with her, for old remembrance sake.

“She looks as though she needed it, Johnny,” said he. “Poor thing! poor thing! And such a pretty, happy little maiden as she used to be, standing in her pinafore amongst the yellow roses in the porch at Islip! Johnny, lad, I hope that vagabond came to be hanged!”

II.

It was ever so long afterwards, and the time had gone on by years, when we again fell into the thread of Dorothy Grape’s life. The Squire was in London for a few days upon some law business, and had brought me with him.

“I should like to see how that poor woman’s getting on, Johnny,” he said to me one morning. “Suppose we go down to Gibraltar Terrace?”

It was a dull, damp, misty day at the close of autumn; and when the Squire turned in at No. 60, after dismissing the cab, he stood still and stared, instead of knocking. A plate was on the door, “James Noak, carpenter and joiner.”

“Has she left, do you think, Johnny?”

“Well, sir, we can ask. Perhaps the carpenter is only lodging here?”

A tidy young woman, with a baby in her arms, answered the knock. “Does Mrs. Mapping live here still?” asked the Squire.

“No, sir,” she answered. “I don’t know the name.”

“Not know the name!” retorted he, turning crusty; for he disliked, of all things, to be puzzled or thwarted. “Mrs. Mapping lived here for ten or a dozen years, anyhow.”

“Oh, stay, sir,” she said, “I remember the name now. Mapping; yes, that was it. She lived here before we came in.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, sir. She was sold up.”

“Sold up?”

“Yes, sir. Her lodging-letting fell off—this neighbourhood’s not what it was: people like to get further up, Islington way—and she was badly off for a long while, could not pay her rent, or anything; so at last the landlord was obliged to sell her up. At least, that’s what we heard after we came here, but the house lay empty for some months between. I did not hear what became of her.”

The people at the next house could not tell anything; they were fresh-comers also; and the Squire stood in a quandary. I thought of Pitt the surgeon; he was sure to know; and ran off to his surgery in the next street.

Changes seemed to be everywhere. Pitt’s small surgery had given place to a chemist’s shop. The chemist stood behind his counter in a white apron. Pitt? Oh, Pitt had taken to a practice further off, and drove his brougham. “Mrs. Mapping?” added the chemist, in further answer to me. “Oh yes, she lives still in the same terrace. She came to grief at No. 60, poor woman, and lodges now at No. 32. Same side of the way; this end.”

No. 32 had a plate on the door: “Miss Kester, dressmaker,” and Miss Kester herself—a neat little woman, with a reserved, not to say sour, face and manner, and a cloud of pins sticking out of her brown waistband—answered the knock. She sent us up to a small back-room at the top of the house.

Mrs. Mapping sat sewing near a fireless grate, her bed in one corner; she looked very ill. I had thought her thin enough before; she was a shadow now. The blue eyes had a piteous look in them, the cheeks a hectic.

“Yes,” she said, in answer to the Squire, her voice faint and her cough catching her every other minute, “it was a sad misfortune for me to be turned out of my house; it nearly broke my heart. The world is full of trouble, sir.”

“How long is it since?”

“Nearly eighteen months, sir. Miss Kester had this room to let, and I came into it. It is quiet and cheap: only half-a-crown a-week.”

“And how do you get the half-crown?” questioned the Squire. “And your dinner and breakfast—how do you get that?”

Mrs. Mapping passed her trembling fingers across her brow before she answered—

“I’m sorry to have to tell of these things, sir. I’m sorry you have found me out in my poverty. When I think of the old days at home, the happy and plentiful days when poor mother was living, and what a different life mine might have been but for the dreadful marriage I made, I—I can hardly bear up against it. I’m sure I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for giving way.”

For the tears were streaming down her thin cheeks. The Squire set up a cough on his own account; I went to the window and looked down at some grimy back-gardens.

“When I am a little stronger, and able to do a full day’s work again, I shall get on, sir, but I’ve been ill lately through going out in the wet and catching cold,” she said, mastering the tears. “Miss Kester is very good in supplying me with as much as I can do.”

“A grand ‘getting on,’” cried the Squire. “You’d be all the better for some fire in that grate.”

“I might be worse off than I am,” she answered meekly. “If it is but little that I have, I am thankful for it.”

The Squire talked a while longer; then he put a sovereign into her hand, and came away with a gloomy look.

“She wants a bit of regular help,” said he. “A few shillings paid to her weekly while she gets up her strength might set her going again. I wonder if we could find any one to undertake it?”

“You would not leave it with herself in a lump, sir?”

“Why, no, I think not; she may have back debts, you see, Johnny, and be tempted to pay them with it; if so, practically it would be no good to her. Wish Pitt lived here still! Wonder if that Miss Kester might be trusted to—— There’s a cab, lad! Hail it.”

The next morning, when we were at breakfast at the hotel—which was not the Tavistock this time—the Squire burst into a state of excitement over his newspaper.

“Goodness me, Johnny! here’s the very thing.”

I wondered what had taken him, and what he meant; and for some time did not clearly understand. The Squire’s eyes had fallen upon an advertisement, and also a leading article, treating of some great philanthropic movement that had recently set itself up in London. Reading the articles, I gathered that it had for its object the distribution of alms on an extensive scale and the comprehensive relieving of the distressed. Some benevolent gentlemen (so far as we could understand the newspaper) had formed themselves into a band for taking the general welfare of the needy into their hands, and devoted their lives to looking after their poverty-stricken brothers and sisters. A sort of universal, benevolent, set-the-world-to-rights invention.

The Squire was in raptures. “If we had but a few more such good men in the world, Johnny! I’ll go down at once and shake their hands. If I lived in London, I’d join them.”

I could only laugh. Fancy the Squire going about from house to house with a bag of silver to relieve the needy!

Taking note of the office occupied by these good men, we made our way to it. Only two of them were present that morning: a man who looked like a clerk, for he had books and papers before him; and a thin gentleman in spectacles.

The Squire shook him by the hand at once, breaking into an ovation at the good deeds of the benevolent brotherhood, that should have made the spectacles before us, as belonging to a member of it, blush.

“Yes,” he said, his cool, calm tones contrasting with the Squire’s hot ones, “we intend to effect a work that has never yet been attempted. Why, sir, by our exertions three parts of the complaints of hunger, and what not, will be done away with.”

The Squire folded his hands in an ecstasy of reverence. “That is, you will relieve it,” he remarked. “Bountiful Samaritans!”

“Relieve it, certainly—where the recipients are found to be deserving,” returned the other. “But non-deserving cases—impostors, ill-doers, and the like—will get punishment instead of relief, if we can procure it for them.”

“Quite right, too,” warmly assented the Squire. “Allow me to shake your hand again, sir. And you gentlemen are out every day upon this good work! Visiting from house to house!”

“Some of us are out every day; we devote our time to it.”

“And your money, too, of course!” exclaimed the Squire. “Listen, Johnny Ludlow,” he cried, turning to me, his red face glowing more and more with every word, “I hope you’ll take a lesson from this, my lad! Their time, and their money too!”

The thin gentleman cleared his throat. “Of course we cannot do all in the way of money ourselves,” he said; “some of us, indeed, cannot do anything in that way. Our operations are very large: a great deal is needed, and we have to depend upon a generous public for help.”

“By their making subscriptions to it?” cried the Squire.

“Undoubtedly.”

The Squire tugged at an inner pocket. “Here, Johnny, help me to get out my cheque-book.” And when it was out, he drew a cheque for ten pounds there and then, and laid it on the table.

“Accept this, sir,” he said, “and my praises with it. And now I should like to recommend to your notice a case myself—a most deserving one. Will you take it in hand?”

“Certainly.”

The Squire gave Mrs. Mapping’s address, telling briefly of her present distress and weakly state, and intimated that the best mode of relief would be to allow her a few shillings weekly. “You will be sure to see to her?” was his parting injunction. “She may starve if you do not.”

“Have no fear: it is our business to do so,” repeated the thin gentleman. “Good-day.”

“Johnny,” said the Squire, going up the street sideways in his excitement, “it is refreshing to hear of these self-denying deeds. These good men must be going on straight for heaven!”

“Take care, sir! Look where you are going.”

The Squire had not been going on straight himself just then, and had bumped up against a foot-passenger who was hurrying along. It was Pitt, the surgeon. After a few words of greeting, the Squire excused his flurry by telling him where he had come from.

“Been there!” exclaimed Pitt, bursting into a laugh. “Wish you joy, sir! We call it Benevolence Hall.”

“And a very good name, too,” said the Squire. “Such men ought to be canonized, Pitt.”

“Hope they will be?” answered Pitt in a curious kind of tone. “I can’t stop now, Mr. Todhetley; am on my way to a consultation.”

“He slips from one like an eel,” cried the Squire, looking after the doctor as he hurried onwards: “I might have spoken to him about Mrs. Mapping. But my mind is at ease with regard to her, Johnny, now that these charitable men have the case in hand: and we shall be up again in a few weeks.”

III.

It was nearly two months before we were again in London, and winter weather: the same business, connected with a lawsuit, calling the Squire up.

“And now for Mrs. Mapping,” he said to me during the afternoon of the second day. So we went to Gibraltar Terrace.

“Yes, she is in her room,” said Miss Kester in a resentful tone, when she admitted us. “It is a good thing somebody’s come at last to see after her! I don’t care to have her alone here on my hands to die.”

“To die!” cried the Squire sharply, supposing the dressmaker spoke only in temper. “What is she dying of?”

“Starvation,” answered Miss Kester.

“Why, what on earth do you mean, ma’am?” demanded he. “Starvation!”

“I’ve done what I could for her, so far as a cup of tea might go, and a bit of bread-and-butter once a day, or perhaps a drop of broth,” ran on Miss Kester in the same aggrieved tone. “But it has been hard times with myself lately, and I have my old mother to keep and a bedridden sister. What she has wanted is a supply of nourishing food; and she has had as good as none of any sort since you were here, sir, being too weak to work: and so, rapid consumption set in.”

She whisked upstairs with the candle, for the short winter day was already closing, and we followed her. Mrs. Mapping sat in an old easy-chair, over a handful of fire, her thin cotton shawl folded round her: white, panting, attenuated, starved; and—there could not be much mistake about it—dying.

“Starved? dying? dear, dear!” ejaculated the Squire, backing to the other chair and sitting down in a sort of terror. “What has become of the good people at Benevolence Hall?”

“They!” cried Miss Kester contemptuously. “You don’t suppose those people would spend money to keep a poor woman from dying, do you, sir?”

“Why, it is their business to do it,” said the Squire. “I put Mrs. Mapping’s case into their hands, and they undertook to see to it.”

“To see to it, perhaps, sir, but not to relieve it; I should be surprised if they did that. One of them called here ever so many weeks ago and frightened Mrs. Mapping with his harsh questions; but he gave her nothing.”

“I don’t understand all this,” cried the Squire, rumpling his hair. “Was it a gentleman?”—turning to Mrs. Mapping.

“He was dressed as one,” she said, “but he was loud and dictatorial, almost as though he thought me a criminal instead of a poor sick woman. He asked me all kinds of questions about my past life, where I had lived and what I had done, and wrote down the answers.”

“Go on,” said the Squire, as she paused for breath.

“As they sent me no relief and did not come again, Miss Kester, after two or three weeks had gone by, was good enough to send a messenger to the place: her nephew. He saw the gentlemen there and told them I was getting weaker daily and was in dreadful need, if they would please to give me a trifle; he said he should never have thought of applying to them but for their having come to see after me. The gentlemen answered unfavourably; inquiries had been made, they sternly told him, and the case was found to be one not suitable for relief, that I did not deserve it. I—I—have never done anything wrong willingly,” sobbed the poor woman, breaking down.

“I don’t think she has, sir; she don’t seem like it; and I’m sure she struggled hard enough to get a living at No. 60,” said Miss Kester. “Any way, they did nothing for her—they’ve just left her to starve and die.”

I had seen the Squire in many a temper, but never in a worse than now. He flung out of the room, calling upon me to follow him, and climbed into the hansom that waited for us outside.

“To Benevolence Hall,” roared he, “and drive like the deuce.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. “Where is Benevolence Hall?”

I gave him the address, and the man whirled us to Benevolence Hall in a very short time. The Squire leaped out and indoors, primed. In the office stood a young man, going over some accounts by gaslight. His flaxen hair was parted down the middle, and he looked uncommonly simple. The rest of the benevolent gentlemen had left for the day.

What the Squire said at first, I hardly know: I don’t think he knew himself. His words came tumbling out in a way that astonished the clerk.

“Mrs. Mapping,” cried the young man, when he could understand a little what the anger was about. “Your ten pounds?—meant for her, you say——”

“Yes, my ten pounds,” wrathfully broke in the Squire; “my ten-pound cheque that I paid down here on this very table. What have you done with it?”

“Oh, that ten pounds has been spent, partly so, at least, in making inquiries about the woman, looking-up her back history and all that. Looking-up the back lives of people takes a lot of money, you see.”

“But why did you not relieve her with it, or a portion of it? That is the question I’ve come to ask, young man, and I intend to have it answered.”

The young man looked all surprise. “Why, what an idea!” lisped he. “Our association does not profess to help sinners. That would be a go!”

“Sinners!”

“We can’t be expected to take up a sinner, you know—and she’s a topping one,” continued he, keeping just as cool as the Squire was hot. “We found out all sorts of dreadful things against the woman. The name, Mapping, is not hers, to begin with. She went to church with a man who had a living wife——”

“She didn’t,” burst in the Squire. “It was the man who went to church with her. And I hope with all my heart he came to be hanged!”

The clerk considered. “It comes to the same, doesn’t it?” said he, vaguely. “She did go to church with him; and it was ever so long before his proper wife found it out; and she has gone on calling herself Mapping ever since! And she managed so badly in a lodging-house she set up, that she was sold out of it for rent. Consider that! Oh, indeed, then, it is not on such people as these that our good gentlemen would waste their money.”

“What do they waste it on?” demanded the Squire.

“Oh, come now! They don’t waste it. They spend it.”

“What on? The sick and needy?”

“Well, you see, the object of this benevolent association is to discover who is deserving and who is not. When an applicant comes or sends for relief, representing that he is sick and starving, and all the rest of it, we begin by searching out his back sins and misfortunes. The chances are that a whole lot of ill turns up. If the case be really deserving, and—and white, you know, instead of black—we relieve it.”

“That is, you relieve about one case in a hundred, I expect?” stormed the Squire.

“Oh, now you can’t want me to go into figures,” said the clerk, in his simple way. “Anybody might know, if they’ve some knowledge of the world, that an out-and-out deserving case does not turn up often. Besides, our business is not relief but inquiry. We do relieve sometimes, but we chiefly inquire.”

“Now look you here,” retorted the Squire. “Your object, inquiring into cases, may be a good one in the main and do some excellent service; I say nothing against it; but the public hold the impression that it is relief your association intends, not inquiry. Why is this erroneous impression not set to rights?”

“Oh, but our system is, I assure you, a grand one,” cried the young fellow. “It accomplishes an immense good.”

“And how much harm does it accomplish? Hold your tongue, young man! Put it that an applicant is sick, starving, dying, for want of a bit of aid in the shape of food, does your system give that bit of aid, just to keep body and soul together while it makes its inquiries—say only to the value of a few pence?”

The young fellow stared. “What a notion!” cried he. “Give help before finding out whether it ought to be given or not? That would be quite a Utopian way of fixing up the poor, that would.”

“And do you suppose I should have given my ten pounds, but for being misled, for being allowed to infer that it would be expended on the distressed?” stamped the Squire. “Not a shilling of it. No money of mine shall aid in turning poor helpless creatures inside out to expose their sins, as you call it. That’s not charity. What the sick and the famished want is a little kindly help—and the Bible enjoins us to give it.”

“But most of them are such a bad lot, you know,” remonstrated the young man.

“All the more need they should be helped,” returned the Squire; “they have bodies and souls to be saved, I suppose. Hold your silly tongue, I tell you. I should have seen to this poor sick woman myself, who is just as worthy as you are and your masters, but for their taking the case in hand. As it is she has been left to starve and die. Come along, Johnny! Benevolence Hall, indeed!”

Back to Gibraltar Terrace now, the Squire fretting and fuming. He was hot and hasty, as the world knows, given to saying anything that came uppermost, justifiable or the contrary: but in this affair it did seem that something or somebody must be wrong.

“Johnny,” said the Squire, as the cab bowled along, waking up out of a brown study, “it seems to me that this is a serious matter of conscience. It was last Sunday evening, wasn’t it, that you read the chapter in St. Matthew which tells of the last judgment?”

“Tod read it, sir. I read the one that followed it.”

“Any way, it was one of you. In that chapter Christ charges us to relieve the poor if we would be saved—the hungry and thirsty, the sick, the naked. Now, see here, lad: if I give my alms to this new society that has sprung up, and never a stiver of it to relieve the distress that lies around me, would the blame, rest on me, I wonder? Should I have to answer for it?”

It was too complicated a question for me. But just then we drew up at Miss Kester’s door.

Mrs. Mapping had changed in that short time. I thought she was dying, thought so as I looked at her. There was a death-shade on the wan face, never seen but when the world is passing away. The Squire saw it also.

“Yes,” said Miss Kester, gravely, in answer to his whisper. “I fear it is the end.”

“Goodness bless me!” gasped the Squire. And he was for ordering in pretty nearly every known restorative the shops keep, from turtle-soup to calves’-foot jelly. Miss Kester shook her head.

“Too late, sir; too late. A month ago it would have saved her. Now, unless I am very much mistaken, the end is at hand.”

Well, he was in a way. If gold and silver could revive the dying, she’d have had it. He sent me out to buy a bottle of port wine, and got Miss Kester’s little apprentice to run for the nearest doctor.

“Not rally again at all, you say! all stuff and nonsense,” he was retorting on Miss Kester when I returned. “Here’s the wine, at last! Now for a glass, Johnny.”

She sipped about a teaspoonful by degrees. The shade on her face was getting darker. Her poor thin fingers kept plucking at the cotton shawl.

“I have never done any harm that I knew of: at least, not wilfully,” she slowly panted, looking piteously at the Squire, evidently dwelling upon the accusation made by Benevolence Hall: and it had, Miss Kester said, troubled her frightfully. “I was only silly—and inexperienced—and—and believed in everybody. Oh, sir, it was hard!”