f, and only
said aloud: "Mary, my dear! Mary!"

"I am sorry to hear you say so, Mrs. Hawker," said Frank; "but it is
just and natural."

"Natural," said Mary, "and just. You are connected in my mind with the
most unhappy and most degraded period of my life. Can you expect that I
should be glad to see you? You were kind to me then, as is your nature
to be, kind and good above all men whom I know. I thought of you always
with love and admiration, as one whom I deeply honoured, but would not
care to look upon again. As the one of all whom I would have forget me
in my disgrace. And now, to-day of all days; just when I have found the
father's vices confirmed in the son, you come before me, as if from the
bowels of the earth, to remind me of what I was."

Mrs. Buckley was very much shocked and provoked by this, but held her
tongue magnanimously. And what do you think, my dear reader, was the
cause of all this hysteric tragic nonsense on the part of Mary? Simply
this. The poor soul had been put out of temper. Her son Charles, as I
mentioned before, had had a scandalous liason with one Meg Macdonald,
daughter of one of the Donovans' (now Brentwood's) shepherds. That
morning, this brazen hussy, as Mary very properly called her, had come
coolly up to the station and asked for Charles. And on Mary's shaking
her fist at her, and bidding her be gone, had then and there rated poor
Mary in the best of Gaelic for a quarter of an hour; and Mary, instead
of venting her anger on the proper people, had taken her old plan of
making herself disagreeable to those who had nothing to do with it,
which naturally made Mrs. Buckley very angry, and even ruffled the
placid Major a little, so that he was not sorry when he saw in his
wife's face, the expression of which he knew so well, that Mary was
going to "catch it."

"I wish, Mary Hawker," said Mrs. Buckley, "that you would remember that
the Dean is our guest, and that on our account alone there is due to
him some better welcome than what you have given him."

"Now, you are angry with me for speaking truth too abruptly," said Mary
crying.

"Well, I am angry with you," said Mrs. Buckley. "If that was the truth,
you should not have spoken it now. You have no right to receive an old
friend like this."

"You are very unkind to me," said Mary. "Just when after so many years'
peace and quietness my troubles are beginning again, you are all
turning against me." And so she laid down her head and