without you to save me from being a
pillar of salt, to make me a loving, happy woman."

"God help you, happy Die!"

"Yes, Gervase; it is those who have been tried that can be trusted, and
I have been in the deep pit, and all clogged with the mire along with
you, and He who brought us out will not suffer us to fall back and be
lost after all."

The neighbours about Ashpound were slow to discover, as erring men and
women are always slow to discover, that God is more merciful than they,
and that he can bring good out of evil, light out of darkness; but they
discovered it at last, and, after a probation, took Mr. and Mrs. Gervase
Norgate back into society and its esteem and regard, and the family at
Ashpound became eventually as well considered, and as much sought after
in friendship and marriage, as any family among the southern moors, long
after John Fitzwilliam Baring had dressed for dinner, and taken a fit
with a cue in his hand.

As for Aunt Tabby and old Miles, they said, "All's well that ends well."
But old Miles stood out stubbornly, "That it is not a many carts afore
the horses as comes in at the journey's end, and it ain't dootiful-like
in them when they does do it, though I'm content." And Aunt Tabby
argued, "It is shockingly against morality to conclude that her
fall--and who'd have thought a strong woman like her would fall?--has
been for his rising again."

MISS WEST'S CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE.

I.

"Miss West, I will thank you to see that the school-books and the
school-work are in their proper places, and the school-room locked for
the holidays."

The speaker, Miss Sandys, was the proprietor of Carter Hill School, and
Miss West was the governess. The season was Christmas, and the children,
without an exception, had departed rejoicing.

With a sense of liberty as keen as the children's, but with a glee of a
decidedly soberer kind, Miss West executed the commission, and then took
her place beside her superior at the parlour-fire.

Miss Sandys was quite an elderly woman. She was over fifty, and had
grown grey in the service. Her features, even in her prime, had been
gaunt, like the rest of her person. But she had mellowed with age, and
had become what the Germans call _charakteristisch_, and what we may
term original and sagacious. She dressed well--that is, soberly and
substantially--in soft wools or strong silks, as she possibly did not
find it easy to do in her youth. She was stately, if som