nts from the neighborhood, assembled
to listen devoutly to the fervent and loving expostulations and
rousings, or the tender consolings and wise instructions, of the
_master_, as every one called him. The hold he had of their hearts was
firm, and his influence on their consciences far reaching.

When there was need of conference or ground for any wide expostulation
the marquis would call a meeting in the chapel; but this occurred very
seldom. Now and then the master, sometimes the marquis himself, would
use it for a course of lectures or a succession of readings from some
specially interesting book; and in what had been the sacristy they
gathered a small library for the use of the neighborhood.

No meeting was held there of a Sunday, for although the clergyman was
the one person to whom all his life the marquis never came any nearer,
he was not the less careful to avoid everything that might rouse
contention or encourage division. "I find the doing of the will of God,"
he would say, "leaves me no time for disputing about His plans--I do not
say for thinking about them." Not, therefore, however, would he waive
the exercise of the inborn right of teaching, and anybody might come to
the house and see the master on Sunday evenings. As to whether people
went to church or stayed away, he never troubled himself in the least;
and no more did the schoolmaster.

The chapel had not been long finished when he had an organ built in it.
Lady Lossie played upon it. Almost every evening, at a certain hour, she
played for a while: the door was always open, and any one who pleased
might sit down and listen. Gradually the feeling of the community, from
the strengthening and concentrating influence of the House, began to
bear upon offenders; and any whose conduct had become in the least
flagrant soon felt that the general eye was upon them, and that
gradually the human tide was falling from them, and leaving them
prisoned in a rocky basin on a barren shore. But at the same time, all
three of the powers at the House were watching to come in the moment
there was a chance; and what with the marquis's warnings, his wife's
encouragements and the master's expostulations there was no little hope
of the final recovery of several who would otherwise most likely have
sunk deeper and deeper.

The marchioness took Lizzy for her personal attendant, and had her boy
much about her; so that by the time she had children of her own she had
some genuine