had found Frederick, too difficult, and had left it, as she had
left Frederick, to God. Nothing of this money was spent on her house
or dress; those remained, except for the great soft sofa, austere. It
was the poor who profited. Their very boots were stout with sins. But
how difficult it had been. Mrs. Arbuthnot, groping for guidance,
prayed about it to exhaustion. Ought she perhaps to refuse to touch
the money, to avoid it as she would have avoided the sins which were
its source? But then what about the parish's boots? She asked the
vicar what he thought, and through much delicate language, evasive and
cautious, it did finally appear that he was for the boots.

At least she had persuaded Frederick, when first he began his
terrible successful career--he only began it after their marriage; when
she married him he had been a blameless official attached to the
library of the British Museum--to publish the memoirs under another
name, so that she was not publicly branded. Hampstead read the books
with glee, and had no idea that their writer lived in its midst.
Frederick was almost unknown, even by sight, in Hampstead. He never
went to any of its gatherings. Whatever it was he did in the way of
recreation was done in London, but he never spoke of what he did or
whom he saw; he might have been perfectly friendless for any mention he
ever made of friends to his wife. Only the vicar knew where the money
for the parish came from, and he regarded it, he told Mrs. Arbuthnot,
as a matter of honour not to mention it.

And at least her little house was not haunted by the loose lived
ladies, for Frederick did his work away from home. He had two rooms
near the British Museum, which was the scene of his exhumations, and
there he went every morning, and he came back long after his wife was
asleep. Sometimes he did not come back at all. Sometimes she did not
see him for several days together. Then he would suddenly appear at
breakfast, having let himself in with his latchkey the night before,
very jovial and good-natured and free-handed and glad if she would
allow him to give her something--a well-fed man, contented with the
world; a jolly, full-blooded, satisfied man. And she was always
gentle, and anxious that his coffee should be as he liked it.

He seemed very happy. Life, she often thought, however much one
tabulated was yet a mystery. There were always some people it was
impossible to place. Frederick was one o