it costs, to do right."

Just then Mary opened the door, entering quickly, and behind her came Dr.
McCabe, to find Damaris talking, talking wildly, sitting up, parched and
vivid with fever, in the disordered bed.

CHAPTER VIII

TELLING HOW TWO PERSONS, OF VERY DIFFERENT MORAL CALIBRE, WERE COMPELLED
TO WEAR THE FLOWER OF HUMILIATION IN THEIR RESPECTIVE BUTTONHOLES

Cross-country connections by rail were not easy to make, with the
consequence that Sir Charles Verity,--Hordle, gun-cases, bags and
portmanteaux, in attendance--did not reach The Hard until close
upon midnight.

Hearing the brougham at last drive up, Theresa Bilson felt rapturously
fluttered. Her course had been notably empty of situations and of
adventure; drama, as in the case of so many ladies of her profession--the
pages of fiction notwithstanding--conspicuously cold-shouldering and
giving her the go-by. Now, drama, and that of richest quality might
perhaps--for she admitted the existence of awkward conjunctions--be said
to batter at her door. She thought of the Miss Minetts, her ever-willing
audience. She thought also--as so frequently during the last, in some
respects, extremely unsatisfactory twenty-four hours--of Mr. Rochester
and of Jane Eyre. Not that she ranged herself with Jane socially or as to
scholastic attainments. In both these, as in natural refinement,
propriety and niceness of ideas, she reckoned herself easily to surpass
that much canvassed heroine. The flavour of the evangelical
charity-school adhered--incontestably it adhered, and that to Jane's
disadvantage. No extravagance of Protestantism or of applied
philanthropy, thank heaven, clouded Theresa's early record. The genius of
Tractarianism had rocked her cradle, and subsequently ruled her studies
with a narrowly complacent pedantry all its own. Nevertheless in moments
of expansion, such as the present, she felt the parallel between her own
case and that of Jane did, in certain directions, romantically hold.
Fortified by thought of the Miss Minetts' agitated interest in all which
might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great
proconsul, her employer--the theme of which, purged of lyrical
redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that
"your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; but I,
Theresa, still remain."

When, however, a summons to the presence of the said employer actually
reached her, the bounc