r less than her present companions, in
one sense; for they puzzled her less, though they teased her more. She
was beginning to understand her mistress, whose mood was usually one of
weary lack of interest and energy, occasionally broken either by seasons
of acute sorrow, or by sudden flashes of fiery anger: and the last were
less trying than the first--indeed, it seemed sometimes to Amphillis
that they served as a vent and a relief; that for a time after them the
weariness was a shade less dreary, and the languor scarcely quite so
overpowering.

Late in the evening, on the night before Harvest Home, Sir Godfrey
returned home, attended by his squire, Master Norman Hylton. The
impression received by Amphillis concerning the master of the house was
that he was a fitting pendant to his wife--tall, square, and stern. She
did not know that Sir Godfrey had been rather wild in his youth, and, as
some such men do, had become correspondingly severe and precise in his
old age. Not that his heart had changed; it was simply that the sins of
youth had been driven out by the sins of maturer life. And Satan is
always willing to let his slaves replace one sin by another, for it
makes them none the less surely his. Sir Godfrey suffered under no
sense of inconsistency in sternly rebuking, when exhibited by Agatha or
Matthew, slight tendencies to evil of the same types as he had once been
addicted to himself. Had he not sown his wild oats, and become a
reformed character? The outside of the cup and platter were now so
beautifully clean, that it never so much as occurred to him to question
the condition of the inside. Yet within were some very foul things--
alienation from God, and hardness of heart, and love of gold, that grew
upon him year by year. And he thought himself a most excellent man,
though he was only a whitewashed sepulchre. He lifted his head high, as
he stood in the court of the temple, and effusively thanked God that he
was not as other men. An excellent man! said everybody who knew him--
perhaps a little too particular, and rather severe on the peccadilloes
of young people. But when the time came that another Voice pronounced
final sentence on that whitewashed life, the verdict was scarcely "Well
done!"

Norman Hylton sat opposite to Amphillis at the supper-table, in the only
manner in which people could sit opposite to each other at a mediaeval
table--namely, when it was in the form of a squared horseshoe. T