right is overborne by the
desire to be seen and approved. I fancy they are rehearsing under their
breath the 'Yes, ma' am,' and the 'No, ma'am,' and the 'I thank you,
ma'am, very much,' which their grown-up sister has been drilling into
them during the hurried toilet they have just been put through in
honour of this sudden call.

How anxious their mother is during the ceremony of introduction! How
keenly, as she sits there, she keeps her eyes fixed on the visitor's
face! Maternal anxiety, in that gaze, seems to be intensified by social
humility. For this is no ordinary visitor. It is some great lady of the
county, very rich, of high fashion, come from a great mansion in a
great park, bringing fruit from one of her own many hot-houses. That
she has come at all is an act of no slight condescension, and the
mother feels it. Even so did homely Mrs. Fairchild look up to Lady
Noble. Indeed, I suspect that this visitor is Lady Noble herself, and
that the Fairchilds themselves are neighbours of this family. These
children have been coached to say 'Yes, my lady,' and 'No, my lady,'
and 'I thank you, my lady, very much'; and their mother has already
been hoping that Mrs. Fairchild will haply pass through the lane and
see the emblazoned yellow chariot at the wicket. But just now she is
all maternal--'These be my jewels.' See with what pride she fingers the
sampler embroidered by one of her girls, knowing well that 'spoilt'
Miss Augusta Noble could not do such embroidery to save her life--that
life which, through her Promethean naughtiness in playing with fire,
she was so soon to lose.

Other exemplary samplers hang on the wall yonder. On the mantelshelf
stands a slate, with an ink-pot and a row of tattered books, and other
tokens of industry. The schoolroom, beyond a doubt. Lady Noble has
expressed a wish to see the children here, in their own haunt, and her
hostess has led the way hither, somewhat flustered, gasping many
apologies for the plainness of the apartment. A plain apartment it is:
dark, bare-boarded, dingy-walled. And not merely a material gloom
pervades it. There is a spiritual gloom, also--the subtly oppressive
atmosphere of a room where life has not been lived happily.

Though these children are cheerful now, it is borne in on us by the
atmosphere (as preserved for us by Morland's master-hand) that their
life is a life of appalling dismalness. Even if we had nothing else to
go on, this evidence of our senses were