ifferent ways showing the influence my lady had
over them), that I believe I had grown to consider him as a very
instrument of evil, and to expect to perceive in his face marks of his
presumption, and arrogance, and impertinent interference. It was now
many weeks since I had seen him, and when he was one morning shown into
the blue drawing-room (into which I had been removed for a change), I was
quite surprised to see how innocent and awkward a young man he appeared,
confused even more than I was at our unexpected tete-a-tete. He looked
thinner, his eyes more eager, his expression more anxious, and his colour
came and went more than it had done when I had seen him last. I tried to
make a little conversation, as I was, to my own surprise, more at my ease
than he was; but his thoughts were evidently too much preoccupied for him
to do more than answer me with monosyllables.

Presently my lady came in. Mr. Gray twitched and coloured more than
ever; but plunged into the middle of his subject at once.

"My lady, I cannot answer it to my conscience, if I allow the children of
this village to go on any longer the little heathens that they are. I
must do something to alter their condition. I am quite aware that your
ladyship disapproves of many of the plans which have suggested themselves
to me; but nevertheless I must do something, and I am come now to your
ladyship to ask respectfully, but firmly, what you would advise me to
do."

His eyes were dilated, and I could almost have said they were full of
tears with his eagerness. But I am sure it is a bad plan to remind
people of decided opinions which they have once expressed, if you wish
them to modify those opinions. Now, Mr. Gray had done this with my lady;
and though I do not mean to say she was obstinate, yet she was not one to
retract.

She was silent for a moment or two before she replied.

"You ask me to suggest a remedy for an evil of the existence of which I
am not conscious," was her answer--very coldly, very gently given. "In
Mr. Mountford's time I heard no such complaints: whenever I see the
village children (and they are not unfrequent visitors at this house, on
one pretext or another), they are well and decently behaved."

"Oh, madam, you cannot judge," he broke in. "They are trained to respect
you in word and deed; you are the highest they ever look up to; they have
no notion of a higher."

"Nay, Mr. Gray," said my lady, smiling, "they are as loyal