aid forthwith. The Thing had come to the _Triarii_,
Miss Joliffe's front was routed, the last rank was wavering. What was
she to do, whither was she to turn? She must sell some of the
furniture, but who would buy such old stuff? And if she sold furniture,
what lodger would take half-empty rooms? She looked wildly round, she
thrust her hands into the pile of papers, she turned them over with a
feverish action, till she seemed to be turning hay once more as a little
girl in the meadows at Wydcombe. Then she heard footsteps on the
pavement outside, and thought for a moment that it was Anastasia
returned before she was expected, till a heavy tread told her that a man
was coming, and she saw that it was Mr Joliffe, her cousin,
churchwarden and pork-butcher. His bulky and unwieldy form moved
levelly past the windows; he paused and looked up at the house as if to
make sure that he was not mistaken, and then he slowly mounted the
semicircular flight of stone steps and rang the bell.

In person he was tall, but disproportionately stout for his height. His
face was broad, and his loose double chin gave it a flabby appearance.
A pallid complexion and black-grey hair, brushed straightly down where
he was not bald, produced an impression of sanctimoniousness which was
increased by a fawning manner of speech. Mr Sharnall was used to call
him a hypocrite, but the aspersion was false, as such an aspersion
commonly is.

Hypocrites, in the pure and undiluted sense, rarely exist outside the
pages of fiction. Except in the lower classes, where deceit thrives
under the incentive of clerical patronage, men seldom assume
deliberately the garb of religion to obtain temporal advantages or to
further their own ends. It is probable that in nine cases out of ten,
where practice does not accord sufficiently with profession to please
the censorious, the discrepancy is due to inherent weakness of purpose,
to the duality of our nature, and not to any conscious deception. If a
man leading the lower life should find himself in religious, or
high-minded, or pure society, and speak or behave as if he were
religious, or high-minded, or pure, he does so in nine cases out of ten
not with any definite wish to deceive, but because he is temporarily
influenced by better company. For the time he believes what he says, or
has persuaded himself that he believes it. If he is froward with the
froward, so he is just with the just, and the more sympathe