g succeeds better than step-mothering," said the rector,
"so far as my experience goes. Men, my dear, are not so exacting; they
are more easily satisfied."

"What nonsense, Herbert! They are not brought so much in contact with
the children, perhaps, you mean; they are not called on to interfere so
much. But how a mother could trust her children's future to a second
husband---- For my part I would rather die."

"Let us hope you will never need to do so, my dear," said the rector, at
which little pleasantry Mrs. Warrender was glad to laugh.

"Happily none of us are in danger," she said. "Chatty must take the
warning to heart and beware of fascinating widowers. Is it true about
the Elms--that the house is empty and every one gone?"

"Thank heaven! it is quite true; gone like a bubble burst, clean swept
out, and not a vestige left."

"As every such place must go sooner or later," said Mrs. Wilberforce.
"That sort of thing may last for a time, but sooner or later----"

"I think," said the rector, "that our friend Cavendish had, perhaps,
something to do with it. It appears that it is an uncle of his who bought
the house when it was sold three years ago, and these people wanted
something done to the drainage, I suppose. I advised Dick to persuade
his uncle to do nothing, hoping that the nuisance--for, I suppose,
however wicked you are, you may have a nose like other people--might
drive them out; and so it has done apparently," Mr. Wilberforce said,
with some complacency, looking like a man who deserved well of his kind.

"They might have caught fever, too, like other people. I wonder if that
is moral, to neglect the drains of the wicked?"

"No," said Mrs. Wilberforce firmly; "they have not noses like other
people. How should they, people living in that way? The sense of smell
is essentially a belonging of the better classes. Servants never smell
anything. We all know that. My cook sniffs and looks me in the face and
says, 'I don't get anything, m'm,' when it is enough to knock you down!
And persons of _that_ description living in the midst of every evil--!
Not that I believe in all that fuss about drains," she added, after a
moment. "We never had any drains in the old times, and who ever heard of
typhoid fever _then_?"

"But if they had been made very ill?" said Chatty, who, up to this time,
had not spoken. "I don't think surely Mr. Cavendish would have done
that."

She was a little moved by this new view. Chatty wa