girl."

And her letters to him--sweet, frank, intelligent, sympathetic--they had
been his founts of refreshing, his manna by the way. Until that fatal
night, when Melrose had crushed in him all that foolish optimism and
self-conceit with which he had entered into the original bargain! Since
then, he knew well that his letters had chilled and disappointed her;
they had been the letters of a slave.

And now this awful business at Mainstairs! Bessie Dobbs, the girl of
eighteen--Lydia's friend--who had been slowly dying since the diphtheria
epidemic of the year before, was dead at last, after much suffering; and
he did not expect to find the child of eight, her little sister, still
alive. There were nearly a score of other cases, and there were three
children down with scarlet fever, besides some terrible attacks of
blood-poisoning--one after childbirth--due probably to some form of the
scarlet fever infection, acting on persons weakened by the long effect of
filthy conditions. What would Lydia say, when she knew--when she came?
From her latest letter it was not clear to him on what day she would
reach home. After making his inspection he would ride on to Green Cottage
and inquire. He dreaded to meet her; and yet he was eager to defend
himself; his mind was already rehearsing all that he would say.

A long lane, shaded by heavy trees, made an abrupt turning, and he saw
before him the Mainstairs village--one straggling street of wretched
houses, mostly thatched, and built of "clay-lump," whitewashed. In a
county of prosperous farming, and good landlords, where cottages had
been largely rebuilt during the preceding century, this miserable
village, with various other hamlets and almost all the cottages attached
to farms on the Melrose estate, were the scandal of the countryside.
Roofs that let in rain and wind, clay floors, a subsoil soaked in every
possible abomination, bedrooms "more like dens for wild animals than
sleeping-places for men and women," to quote a recent Government report,
and a polluted water supply!--what more could reckless human living,
aided by human carelessness and cruelty, have done to make a hell of
natural beauty?

Over the village rose the low shoulder of a grassy fell, its patches of
golden fern glistening under the October sunshine; great sycamores, with
their rounded masses of leaf, hung above the dilapidated roofs, as though
Nature herself tried to shelter the beings for whom men had no care;