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CHAPTER VIII.

"Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?
Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,
Seduce it into carrion? So with me.

I was not ever, as you say, seduced,
But simply murdered.

Down came next day's noon and caught me there
Half gibbering and half raging on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine, when God himself
Was certainly abolished."
Aurora Leigh.

TOWARDS the end of June, Armstrong paid one of his now infrequent visits to "The Pansies,” Jannings's cottage. He was glad that Mrs. Smith had got so much better, and was now apparently doing well. As he could afford her no further help for he supposed her hidden sorrow was quite beyond his power to alleviate, and all he could say to her she heard in his sermons-all

H

special remembrance of her was fading fast out of his mind, especially as the prosecution of his critical studies was becoming more intensely anxious and difficult. It seemed to him as if in the proportion in which his church of All Souls advanced towards completion, his hopes of ever preaching in it diminished. However, with resolute grasp he held at a distance the sceptical conclusions that began to seem inevitable, knowing how things held near to our small vision block out the light, and even blot out all the world. He must calmly wait on.

So this hot, weary June evening, as he sat by the open window in Mrs. Smith's room, reading a few verses from his favourite Psalm, the twenty-seventh, she was struck more deeply than she had ever been before with an expression of intense pain in his countenance. So, without purposing it, she said, as he paused at the end of the ninth verse, "Ah, Sir, you, too, suffer; and that is why your words reached to my soul when it was dead to all but the hope of death. Only you are holy and good, and I am not."

Then, fearing her words would be misunder

stood by the only friend she had in the world, she instantly added, "I mean I am not holy, but I am innocent," and her eyes flashed with light.

"I always knew that," very gently returned Armstrong, but with a tone of pain quite perceptible. He had carefully avoided all expressions that he thought might have led her to tell him her sad story. He did not like having confided to him so many painful histories, unless there was a use in it, and wondered why all sorts of people opened their griefs to him. But, in truth, he was one of the natively-formed great souls, tender, with delicate sympathies, and stern in honour, who are the true priests to whom confessions must be made, and more, by whom absolution can be given. For when he, so good and holy, held out hope to the erring, and did not disdain them in their vileness, it was a prophecy and pledge that the good God would be merciful too and forgive them, and it gave life to the awful hope that damning sins could be absolved from their souls. Indeed, with the dawn of the hope the cleansing began.

But this woman needed to have kindled in her, not hope of pardon, but a hope which, when once dead, is harder far to restore,—a hope which, she felt, not earth nor heaven, nor the God of both, could call back to life.

"You are too holy to despise me if I tell you, Sir, and I have often wanted to tell one friend here, in case of any accident to my mind."

She pushed her chair back behind the curtain, and spoke on in a hoarse, low voice out from the dim darkness.

"Father died when I was little.

Darling mother died when I was twelve. Then a lady who knew my mother took charge of me, and sent me to a good boarding-school. Then, as they said I made good progress, she sent me to a German school for two years, where I studied German and French and Italian. When I was eighteen she made me governess to her younger daughters. The family removed to Florence. The eldest son came on a visit from college. When none of his sisters were near, he courted me. I was afraid of him; I knew he was wicked; I hated him; I would not speak a word

to him; I would not stop anywhere near him for an instant unless his sisters were by."

The girl's voice-she was still so younggrew husky with strong passion, but sank lower in tone. Armstrong would have stopped the sad recital, but who was he that he should refuse his ear to the shame that a sister had had to suffer? If God could allow it, surely he could hear of it. And besides, he might be of some help.

"I hated him, but God did not. He bribed the maid who slept in the room with me, and one night she put some drug into my drink." The voice of the poor creature was altogether choked with mingled emotions of rage, shame, grief. Armstrong covered his face with his hands, murmuring, "Good God, it was too evil to be suffered !-don't speak more."

"In the morning," she gasped convulsively, "the maid laughed at me, said I was a fool to mind being made a fine lady. I could not control my passion. I don't know what I did. I saw him. I could have torn his eyes out, but I disdained to touch him, even to murder him. He said he would take care of me; that if I said