rd and lodging; should refuse
to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a
name,--these things seemed to Miss Smith-Waters, with her
smaller-catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of
sheer madness. Yet Herminia had so endeared herself to the old
lady's soul that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith-Waters went
upstairs to her own room with a neuralgic headache, and never again
in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms
than as "my poor dear sweet misguided Herminia."

But when it became known next morning in Bower Lane that the
queenly-looking school-mistress who used to go round among "our
girls" with tickets for concerts and lectures and that, had
disappeared suddenly with the nice-looking young man who used to
come a-courting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and
surprise of respectable Bower Lane was simply unbounded. "Who
would have thought," the red-faced matrons of the cottages
remarked, over their quart of bitter, "the pore thing had it in
her! But there, it's these demure ones as is always the slyest!"
For Bower Lane could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgar
standard (as did also Belgravia). Most low minds, indeed, imagine
absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodness
and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen to
disbelieve in their own blood-thirsty deities, or their own vile
woman-degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvy
philosophy of Bower Lane and of Belgravia, what is usual is right;
while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass
around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal.

VIII.

They were bound for Italy; so Alan had decided. Turning over in his
mind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determined
that Herminia's confinement had better take place somewhere else
than in England. The difficulties and inconveniences which block
the way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable;
in Italy, people would only know that an English signora and her
husband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn old
palazzo. To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a moment
was in many ways to the last degree distasteful; for her own part,
she hated the merest appearance of concealment, and would rather
have flaunted the open expression of her supreme moral faith before
the eyes of all London. But