s eyes, while his wife, sitting by him, held his
hand.

"Don't make yourself wretched, Mark. Matters will all come right yet.
It cannot be that the loss of a few hundred pounds should ruin you."

"It is not the money--it is not the money!"

"But you have done nothing wrong, Mark."

"How am I to go into the church, and take my place before them all,
when every one will know that bailiffs are in the house?" And then,
dropping his head on to the table, he sobbed aloud.

Mark Robarts's mistake had been mainly this,--he had thought to
touch pitch and not to be defiled. He, looking out from his pleasant
parsonage into the pleasant upper ranks of the world around him, had
seen that men and things in those quarters were very engaging. His
own parsonage, with his sweet wife, were exceedingly dear to him, and
Lady Lufton's affectionate friendship had its value; but were not
these things rather dull for one who had lived in the best sets at
Harrow and Oxford;--unless, indeed, he could supplement them with
some occasional bursts of more lively life? Cakes and ale were as
pleasant to his palate as to the palates of those with whom he had
formerly lived at college. He had the same eye to look at a horse,
and the same heart to make him go across a country, as they. And
then, too, he found that men liked him,--men and women also; men and
women who were high in worldly standing. His ass's ears were tickled,
and he learned to fancy that he was intended by nature for the
society of high people. It seemed as though he were following his
appointed course in meeting men and women of the world at the houses
of the fashionable and the rich. He was not the first clergyman that
had so lived and had so prospered. Yes, clergymen had so lived, and
had done their duties in their sphere of life altogether to the
satisfaction of their countrymen--and of their sovereigns. Thus
Mark Robarts had determined that he would touch pitch, and escape
defilement if that were possible. With what result those who have
read so far will have perceived. Late on the following afternoon
who should drive up to the parsonage door but Mr. Forrest, the bank
manager from Barchester--Mr. Forrest, to whom Sowerby had always
pointed as the _Deus ex machina_ who, if duly invoked, could relieve
them all from their present troubles, and dismiss the whole Tozer
family--not howling into the wilderness, as one would have wished to
do with that brood of Tozers, but so gorged wi