er anxious
and unhappy, and, what was perhaps the greatest achievement of all,
actually succeeded in making that mother cry. For of course Priscilla
was the ultimate cause of these unusual tears, as Lady Shuttleworth
very well knew. Lady Shuttleworth was the deceased Sir Augustus's
second wife, had married him when she was over forty and well out of
the crying stage, which in the busy does not last beyond childhood,
had lost him soon after Tussie's birth, had cried copiously and most
properly at his funeral, and had not cried since. It was then
undoubtedly a great achievement on the part of the young lady from
nowhere, this wringing of tears out of eyes that had been dry for one
and twenty years. But the list of what Priscilla had done does not end
with this havoc among mothers. Had she not interrupted the decent
course of Mrs. Jones's dying, and snatched her back to a hankering
after the unfit? Had she not taught the entire village to break the
Sabbath? Had she not made all its children either sick or cross under
the pretence of giving them a treat? On the Monday she did something
else that was equally well-meaning, and yet, as I shall presently
relate, of disastrous consequences: she went round the village from
cottage to cottage making friends with the children's mothers and
leaving behind her, wherever she went, little presents of money. She
had found money so extraordinarily efficacious in the comforting of
Mrs. Jones that before she started she told Fritzing to fill her purse
well, and in each cottage it was made somehow so clear how badly
different things were wanted that the purse was empty before she was
half round the village and she had to go back for a fresh supply. She
was extremely happy that afternoon, and so were the visited mothers.
They, indeed, talked of nothing else for the rest of the day,
discussed it over their garden hedges, looked in on each other to
compare notes, hurried to meet their husbands on their return from
work to tell them about it, and were made at one stroke into something
very like a colony of eager beggars. And in spite of Priscilla's
injunction to Mrs. Jones to hide her five-pound note all Symford knew
of that as well, and also of the five-pound note Mrs. Morrison had
taken away. Nothing was talked of in Symford but Priscilla. She had in
one week created quite a number of disturbances of a nature fruitful
for evil in that orderly village; and when on the Tuesday she and
Fritzing