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at their command they have to consider how to use it so as to carry on the enterprise in which all men are enlisted-the making the world better and happier than they found it. This is the real responsibility of leisure. Men whose occupations are marked out for them have no choice in the matter. They go forth to their work and to their labour until the evening. But all persons, whether men or women, who can determine, or in so far as they can determine, their occupations for themselves, must, if they would be anything better than cumberers of the ground, do what lies in them to promote directly the object which busy men are promoting indirectly.

In this way we get at the fallacy of the second inference which, as has been said, may seem to follow from the demonstration of the vices of charity as at present understood. It cannot be true that women are not fit ministers of charity, because they, far more than men, have the leisure which makes charity, in the direct sense of the term, possible, and in making it possible raises it to the rank of a duty. Leisure is the especial possession of women of the upper classes. It is equally, no doubt, the possession, and equally the abused possession, of large numbers of men; but still the proportion of women who have nothing especial to do over women who are occupied in necessary employments is very much greater than in the case of men. There are other differences between the sexes which point in the same direction, but this one is allsufficient for the purpose. If the meaning of charity were properly understood, and its scope properly appreciated, there would be no more complaints from women about having nothing to do-no more complaints, that is, except from women who stand in need of maintenance as well as of occupation. In every direction they would see work waiting to be done, and the only thing wanting would be the knowledge how to set about it. Happily the means of gaining this knowledge are not beyond their reach. Its attainment needs only the modesty which comes from conscious and admitted ignorance. This qualification it is the object of the present paper to help in creating, in however small a measure. It is not meant to deter any woman from devoting herself to charitable work. The more that do so the better, whether for themselves, or for society. It is only meant to lead women to ask themselves, Is the work that I am doing really charitable? What is the end that I propose to myself in doing it? In what way do I expect the poor to be the better for my services? Have I good reason to think that the results I wish to see produced are produced, or that, if produced, they are really as beneficial to the poor as I have hitherto taken for granted that they will be? As was said just now, no woman who devotes herself in any degree to charitable work ought to take so little interest in the subject as to be ignorant that all the old forms of charity have of late years been undergoing a searching investigation, and that many of them are altogether discredited. When once a process of this kind has begun, there is no saying off-hand how far it will go. It is

the first instance of applying the experimental method to acts of benevolence; and when tested by results, those which were thought to have the best justification may prove the most mistaken. When a navy has to be reconstructed, it is impossible to suspend ship-building until the absolutely best form of armour-plating has been decided on; and, in the case of charity, it would be equally impossible to do nothing for necessitous persons until the best method of helping them has been discovered. But, just as a prudent naval constructor keeps his mind constantly open to new ideas, and is always on the watch for possible defects and possible improvements in the models with which he is familiar, so a wise administrator of charity will be always eager to enlarge her knowledgeto compare what she has been doing with what others are doing-to derive, alike from her own experience and from theirs, fresh means of judging her own past work and fresh hints for improving her future. work. If once the enquiring and teachable spirit is there, she will find no lack of competent guides. There is not a single charitable enterprise of any real merit now going on which does not find the greatest obstacle to success to be the difficulty of finding workers to carry on existing operations and to begin new ones. The harvest is plenteous, but the labourers are few. Those who would benefit by the knowledge which is constantly accumulating must be prepared to part company with many cherished fancies, and to deny themselves much that has heretofore given them pleasure. But they will reap their reward in the sense that their work is work that will bear enquiry alike as regards the ends at which it aims and the means by which it proposes to secure them. Hitherto they have been obliged to shut their eyes to consequences, and to seek in the goodness of their motive some compensation for the mischievous results of their acts. In future they may have to wait long before any results appear, but they will be sustained in their watch by the certainty that, when they appear, they cannot be other than satisfactory.

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Keeping Faith.

CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST MEETING.

BETWEEN fifty and sixty years ago Tunbridge Wells was still in the sunset of its glory. It might be, nay, it had always been, a cockney paradise, but the cockneyism continued more or less aristocratic so long as royal dukes paid flying visits to the Pantiles and the Assembly Rooms, and princesses tarried for weeks enjoying the benefit of the waters. Tunbridge was found the proper combination of nature and art, of chalked boards and grey rocks, green tables and green fields, early and late hours, which the gay world of a former generation took to mean rural felicity-supposing rural felicity existed. The impression lasted after the master of the ceremonies had become a mere decorous cipher in comparison with the half gallant, half brutal tyrant of former days.

Still, parties of ladies of quality drove out on the pleasant country roads to Frant or to Southburgh in the state of a barouche-and-four, though they had ceased to masquerade in the guise of orange-girls and farmers' daughters, when courtiers chaffered with buxom, red-cheeked wenches at the fair on Tunbridge Common. So late as 1807 a young lady of fortune eloped with a player from Tunbridge Wells. Hostile meetings continued to be held among the more remote golden gorse of Rusthall, by gentlemen in high-necked, short-waisted coats, and plaited shirt-frills, like that held by Castlereagh and Canning nearer town, where the least that could be apprehended was a flesh wound or a shot in the thigh, not counted dangerous. The Kent Fencibles were in great favour with the whole country, as who could tell when their services might not be required, to repel an invasion ?—in the news at home and abroad of the sailing of ships and the marching of armies; how the great Walcheren expedition had gone out, and come back again, minus the victims of ague; how Sir Sydney Smith was heard of here and Sir Arthur Wellesley there; and the news from Germany were bitterly bad, but the tidings from Russia highly cheering. The old world had not lost its gay and strong, no, nor its coarse, tints,

During one autumn, between fifty and sixty years ago, there arrived at Tunbridge Wells, under the guardianship of her grandmother, Lady Stukely, Lady Catherine Fortescue, of Oxham. Lady Catherine was a young orphan of rank, fortune, and beauty, whose parents had both died in her infancy; while the estate of the earl, her father, had descended, by

the terms of its entail, to Lady Catherine, separate from the earldom, which passed to the heir male.

Lady Stukely and Lady Catherine lodged in a house, already oldfashioned, on the Parade, with its gable fronting the street, its red roof, its balcony, commanding a fine view of the early and late promenaders (though national and world-wide lions were no longer so obliging as to stalk and roar in packs below), and of the charmed fountain in the centre of the street, where the merchants of the four seasons in flowers, vegetables, and fruit, were wont to congregate on the steps amidst splendid, luscious bits of Flemish colouring-made up of tiger lilies and creamy white roses, of radishes and cucumbers, of crimson strawberries, or amber and amethyst plums.

The same accommodating balcony commanded the constant tide of company going to and coming from the principal hotel opposite, and, in addition, restful glimpses of quiet parklike woods and pastures, by comparison, far away. The Tunbridge assemblies began at so primitive an hour that Lady Catherine, seated before her high, narrow mirror, could glance out, while it was still barred with sunshine and shadow, at the busy outer world, in which she took a lively interest, where, to promenade with her grandmother and her grandmother's friends to the music of the band, to watch the general company, to do a little shopping, were treats only next in order to this long-looked-forward-to, eagerly-anticipated ball.

Of course Lady Catherine was very foolish and ignorant, though she was supposed to be solidly instructed in the information and accomplishments of her rank and era; she had been put through a good deal of reading, English, French and Italian, and she could accompany herself, tunefully, on the harp when she sang "Di Tanti Palpiti" and "Said a Smile to a Tear." But she was charmingly natural, and charmingly lovely at this period of her life, with a loveliness which is difficult to describe; it was at once so fresh and so dainty, like that of a lady's smock out in the Tunbridge meadows; but the lady's smocks were to be found in thousands, and Lady Catherine, taking her all in all, was unique. She had a very fair, shell-pink-tinted complexion, contrasting, pleasantly, with chestnut-brown hair, small delicate features belonging to a little oval face, and cheerful grey eyes opening in a mixture of wonder and trust on what seemed to her a happy world where, orphan as she was, and without brother or sister, she had never wanted friends.

She

Lady Catherine's dress was of dim pearly-white crape, with a border worked in silver shells, and looped up with silver cords and tassels. wore on her shapely girlish head a small white satin hat, inclining a little over one temple, with a single Prince of Wales' feather fastened in its band by the Oxham cluster of diamond wheat-ears which Lady Catherine's mother had worn on her presentation to young Queen Charlotte. The little hat alone might have made its wearer look like an Arcadian shepherdess, but its combination with the single wavy white feather standing up in front of the tiny ear, as the finishing stroke of the taste of the day

to the dress of a young lady in Lady Catherine's position, constituted the fairy princess who was starting to meet the prince. The hat and feather took nothing from the youthfulness of the aspirant, while it added to that youthfulness an indescribable element of maidenly dignity and stateliness perfectly compatible with modesty and sprightliness.

Lady Catherine looked at herself with innocent complacency, and in her trepidation arranged a fold here and a knot there, beat time with eager foot to imaginary dance airs, drew on her gloves to try and beguile the interval which must elapse before Lady Stukely, who had been anxiously overlooking her grand-daughter's toilette, should have completed her own. Lady Catherine had pledged herself to sit as steady as a rock, not rise and run about and plume herself like a restless bird deranging its fine feathers in the pluming. But the restlessness was getting the better of her, and even healthy young Lady Catherine was in danger of becoming nervous over her debût. Her fleeting glances out of the window were fixed by an arrival at the hotel opposite, and she seized on the diversion.

"Sally, what is going on? what do you see there?" Lady Catherine called to her elderly maid, who, now that she had discharged the most onerous functions that her office was ever likely to bring her, unless it should be on Lady Catherine's wedding morning, had retired to a seat at the window and methodically resumed her work, only intermitting it to keep a watchful, admiring eye on her young mistress. This Sally, with regard to whom Lady Catherine did not fall into the hard unfeminine habit, just coming into practice, of dropping the Christian name and employing merely the surname, was a link between the picturesque Abigails of Pope's "Betty" type and the commonplace or tawdry soubrettes represented by "Jenkins," or "Dawson," "Dupont," or "Schmidt." Sally Judd was not a dame de compagnie as imperious, whimsical and saucy as her mistress, neither was she an enterprising hairdresser's or milliner's assistant, whose merit lay in her fingers, or, at farthest, in her eyes. Sally could not only say her church catechism and the responses in her prayer-book by heart, read and write and cast up accounts, she could bake and brew, distil scents and medicine, besides being an adept at plain sewing. She had some experience of real human life; she was trustworthy and sensible; though not a dame de compagnie, she was a companionable woman.

Sally, sitting in her good, sober gown, white apron and cap, sewing busily, responded to her mistress's appeal.

"There is a travelling chariot just entering the inn yard, Lady Catherine, and a party of five officers alighting."

"Oh, dear, how late they will be," Lady Catherine clasped her hands and regretted, disinterestedly; "they will miss the opening by the Master and her Grace and all the earlier sets."

"But you will not miss 'em, my lady." Sally comforted her mistress with a short, half-bashful compliment.

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