she seems to have been then with what she is now. We give it up.

Only, we wish to remark that it is her offence against her _fiance_
alone that we find it hard to stomach. As to her relations with
Colonel Penderfield, we can say nothing without full particulars. And
even if we had them, and they bore hard upon Miss Graythorpe, our mind
would go back to the Temple in Jerusalem, and a morning nearly two
thousand years ago. The voice that said who was to cast the first
stone is heard no more, or has merged in ritual. But the Scribes and
Pharisees are with us still, and quite ready to do the pelting. We
should be harder on the Colonel, no doubt, with our prejudices; only,
observe! he isn't brought up for judgment. He never is, any more
than the other party was that day in Jerusalem. But, then, the
Scribes and Pharisees were male! And they had the courage of their
convictions--their previous convictions!--and acted on them in their
selection of the culprit.

Without further apology for retailing conjecture as certainty, the
following may be taken as substantially the story of this lady--we do
not know whether to call her a divorced or a deserted wife--and her
little encumbrance.

She found a resource in her trouble in the person of this old friend
of her stepfather Paul Nightingale, Colonel (at that time Major) Lund.
This officer had remained on in harness to the unusual age of
fifty-eight, but it was a civil appointment he held; he had retired
from active service in the ordinary course of things. It was probably
not only because of his old friendship for her stepfather, but because
the poor girl told him her unvarnished tale in full and he believed
it, that he helped and protected her through the critical period
that followed her parting from her husband; found her a domicile and
seclusion, and enlisted on her behalf the sympathies of more than one
officer's wife at our Sally's birth-place--Umritsur, if Major Roper
was right. He corresponded with her mother as intercessor and
mediator, but that good lady was in no mood for mercy: had her
daughter not told her that she was too old to think of marriage? Too
old! And had she not called her venerable sub-dean a withered old
sow-thistle? She could forgive, under guarantees of the sinner's
repentance; for had not her Lord enjoined forgiveness where the bail
tendered was sufficient? Only, so many reservations and qualifications
occurred in her interpretations of the Gospel na