, she
nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just starting off her
ponies at full speed, equally eager 'to tell Harry' and to ransack
Churton for the stores required, when it occurred to her to pull up
again.

'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing but talk about
your sister-in-law. _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself? Is it kind,
is it neighborly, to have such a wonder to stay with you and let nobody
share?'

'A wonder?' said Robert, amused. 'Rose plays the violin very well,
but--'

'As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!' exclaimed Lady
Helen. 'My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season
if you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte
knows all the world and his wife. And if I'm there, and Miss Leyburn
will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect
her a little from Aunt Charlotte?'

The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his
hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have
thought all this effusion insincere or patronizing. But Lady Helen was
the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only highborn woman he had ever
met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the 'nonsense of
rank.' Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte's social tolerance to be
a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favorite brother Hugh,
to judge from the accounts of him, must always have found life too
romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting from top to bottom, to
be measured by any but romantic standards.

Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored
his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked God every
morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who
had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired,
had only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry,
leaving a check behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong
language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled.

A few days later Mr. Wendover's crimes as a landowner, his agent's
brutality, young Elsmere's devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End
outbreak, were in everybody's mouth. The county was roused. The Radical
newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming article; Robert, much
to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come
in to him freely.

On the Monda