ion as the
heroine of her father's book. Like the girl Ione, in "The Unexplored,"
she had lived in a charmed seclusion, far from the roar of modern
civilization, far from the great cities which are the abomination of
desolation in our time. Knowledge had come to her filtered through the
minds of those who closed their eyes to evil and their ears to tales of
sin. She did not know how the poor lived: she had only the vaguest and
haziest possible notions concerning misery and want and disease. She was
not only pure and innocent, but she was ignorant. She had scarcely ever
seen a newspaper. She had read very few novels. She had lived almost all
her life with women, and she had imbibed the notion that her marriage
was a matter which her mother would arrange without particularly
consulting her (Lesley's) inclinations.

To a girl brought up in this way there was much to shock and repel in
Caspar Brooke's romance. More than once, indeed, she put it down
indignantly: more than once she cried out, in the silence of her room,
"Oh, but it can't be true!" Nevertheless, she knew in her heart of
hearts that the strong and burning words which she was reading could not
have been written were they not sincerely felt. And as for facts, she
could easily put them to the test. She could ask other people to tell
her whether they were true. Were there really so many criminals in
London; so many people "without visible means of subsistence?" so many
children going out in a morning to their Board Schools without
breakfast? But surely something ought to be done! How could people sit
down and allow these things to be? How could her father himself, who
wrote about such things, live in comfort, even (compared with the
wretchedly poor) in modest luxury, without lifting a finger to help
them?

But there Lesley caught herself up. What had Mr. Kenyon said? Had he not
spoken of the things that Caspar Brooke had done? For almost the first
time Lesley began to wonder what made her father so busy. She had never
heard a word concerning the pursuits that Mr. Kenyon had mentioned as so
engrossing. "The splendid work at Macclesfield Buildings:" what was
that? The people whom he had helped: what people? Whom could she ask?
Not her father himself--that was out of the question. He never spoke to
her except on trivial subjects. She remembered with a sudden and painful
flash of insight, that conversations between him and his sister were
sometimes broken off when s