moothly with the owner of Mellor. He had a great respect for
"dignities," and she, as far as the village was concerned, was to be his
"dignity" henceforward. Moreover, he humbly and truly hoped that she
might be able to enlighten him as to a good many modern conceptions and
ideas about the poor, for which, absorbed as he was, either in
almsgiving of the traditional type, or spiritual ministration, or
sacramental theory, he had little time, and, if the truth were known,
little affinity.

In answer to her knock Marcella heard a faint "Come in" from the
interior of the house. She walked into the dining-room, and found Mary
sitting by the little table in tears. There were some letters before
her, which she pushed away as Marcella entered, but she did not attempt
to disguise her agitation.

"What is it, dear? Tell me," said Marcella, sitting down beside her, and
kissing one of the hands she held.

And Mary told her. It was the story of her life--a simple tale of
ordinary things, such as wring the quiet hearts and train the unnoticed
saints of this world. In her first youth, when Charles Harden was for a
time doing some divinity lecturing in his Oxford college, Mary had gone
up to spend a year with him in lodgings. Their Sunday teas and other
small festivities were frequented by her brother's friends, men of like
type with himself, and most of them either clergymen or about to be
ordained. Between one of them, a young fellow looking out for his first
curacy, and Mary an attachment had sprung up, which Mary could not even
now speak of. She hurried over it, with a trembling voice, to the
tragedy beyond. Mr. Shelton got his curacy, went off to a parish in the
Lincolnshire Fens, and there was talk of their being married in a year
or so. But the exposure of a bitter winter's night, risked in the
struggle across one of the bleakest flats of the district to carry the
Sacrament to a dying parishioner, had brought on a peculiar and
agonising form of neuralgia. And from this pain, so nobly earned, had
sprung--oh! mystery of human fate!--a morphia-habit, with all that such
a habit means for mind and body. It was discovered by the poor fellow's
brother, who brought him up to London and tried to cure him. Meanwhile
he himself had written to Mary to give her up. "I have no will left, and
am no longer a man," he wrote to her. "It would be an outrage on my
part, and a sin on yours, if we did not cancel our promise." Charles,
who took a ha