"Honor!" he shouted, "get out of the way at once. dangerous when opposed."

I am

"Not to me," she answered; "I am not afraid of you, drunk or sober. You shall not cross this doorstep."

He stood eyeing her, with the post half raised, threateningly. She met his unsteady gaze without flinching. Was there no one to see her there but the tipsy Charles and the frightened children? A pity if there was not. She was erect, dignified, with bosom expanded, as her bare arms were behind her. Her cheeks were brilliant with colour; her fallen hair, raining about her shoulders, blazed with the red evening sun on it; her large hazel eyes were also full of fire. Her bosom heaved as she breathed fast and hard. She wore a pale, faded print dress, and a white apron. Below, her red ankles and feet were planted firm as iron on the sacred doorstep of Home, that she protected.

As Charles stood irresolute, opposite her, the children in the lane, thinking he was about to strike her, began to scream.

In a moment Hillary Nanspian appeared, sprang up the steps, caught Charles by the shoulder, struck the post out of his hand, and dragging him down the steps, flung him his length in the road.

"Lie there, you drunken blackguard!" he said; "you shall not stand up till you have begged your sister's pardon, and asked permission to sleep off your drink in the stable."

TEMPLE BAR.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED" BENTLEY'S MISCELLANY."

"DRO

MARCH 1887.

A Village Tragedy.

PART I.

ROP it, yer white-faced monkey, or I'll give yer something to snivel for."

Some one was saying it in a fierce screeching voice, as James Pontin's heavy foot creaked on the last step of the staircase; the crazy staircase of a London lodging-house, fetid-smelling and pitch dark, except where a streak of grey light fell across it through an open doorway. In the room beyond half-a-dozen dingy-coloured children were crawling like vermin, distinguishable only by their movement from the dingy floor, and a one-eyed woman sat at a table rocking herself over an empty glass. James was a solid bumpkin, but a curious sensation of moral and physical sickness came over him as he glanced in at the party, and then creaked on up, up the black well of the staircase. To think that a brother of his, a respectable Pontin, had crept into such a hole to die! "This is what comes of stiffnecked ways and wanting to live different from your father and grandfather before you, that were better men than you by a long chalk." Pride of race is not so exclusively confined to the gentry as is sometimes believed, and there was a dull sense of outraged family dignity about the scion of all the respectable Pontins as he knocked at his dead brother's door. For a moment he heard, or seemed to hear, the harsh voice yelling fierce words, and to see through the gaping chinks of the door-hinges a woman in black threateningly waving a toastingfork; but the rustic mind is not a plate prepared for instantaneous photography, and before the impression had time to fix itself it was effaced, for he stood in the room. It was a dark room with a large dirty bed in one corner and a table in the middle, covered

VOL. LXXIX.

Y

with a greasy remnant of linen and some odds and ends of unwashed crockery. It also contained a broken-down chest of drawers and three chairs; nothing besides, except the trestles the coffin had rested upon. The woman in black still stood by the table, but the toasting-fork was on the floor; and she held herself up stiff and straight, very conscious of her weeds, whose depth would not have disgraced a duchess, if their colour suggested the slopshop round the corner. She was a tall, handsome woman, but she had broken teeth, which made her smile look ugly to the most superficial observer. Indeed she was not much accustomed to disguising her real character; and if the lachrymose whine in which she offered her brother-in-law a seat was different from the shrill scream he had heard outside, it was not a whit pleasanter. However, this was of no consequence, for had she been the most consummate actress in the world her art would have been thrown away on brother James. He had known for years that George's Selina was a bad 'un, and when he once knew a thing he knew it; he was not one to go chopping and changing his opinion about folks just according as they might choose to behave. But when there is a death in the family an unusual mutual politeness is expected of its members, and under any circumstances Mr. Pontin had a sort of dignity of his own, not traceable either to intelligence or refinement. So having seated himself, he exchanged the due salutations.

"I hope you find yourself pretty tolerable, Mrs. George." "As tolerable as can be expected, thank you kindly, Mr. And how are you?"

Pontin.

Then followed Brother James's regrets at having missed the funeral; which were no polite half-truths, but the expression of genuine feelings, not to say reproaches.

"If I'd ha' known a day sooner I'd ha' come, cost what cost might. Why I got up at three o'clock in the morning last Tuesday was a year to 'ttend Cousin Gale's burying at Watlington. I'd never ha' believed one of my own brothers would be buried and me not there."

"It was the medical orficer as did it," said Mrs. George, sulkily apologetic. "He said as the corpse didn't ought to stay in the room along with us." Then after a pause of contemptuous mental contemplation, she continued: "He made a poor corpse, did George; but I buried him handsome all the same, with his insurance money. Nobody can't say as I've not done things respectable, though he wasn't the husband he might have been, Mr. Pontin; Lord forgive him, he wasn't-which it's gospel truth, miss; so don't you give me none of your impudence."

The last words were addressed energetically to the ragged bed-curtain, from whose folds Selina's disparaging remarks upon her late spouse had momentarily evoked a small white face, looking flat contradiction.

"Is that Annie?" asked James, with a touch of interest.

Annie had always been one of those children who have an instinctive dislike to offering even sympathetic witnesses the spectacle of their tears. Having had time to wipe her eyes and compose her features behind the bed-curtains, she now stood up very straight, and answered "Yes, Uncle," in a quiet, civil voice. She was really fifteen, but she looked very small and childish in the second-hand black frock she filled so inadequately, and she had kept those large liquid eyes, blue even to the whites, which are so common and usually so fleeting a beauty among the children of the Southern Midlands. Her hair, too, was bright and soft like a child's. James Pontin looked at her a few seconds in silence. Then he said

"Her father told me as she favoured our family. You've got a look of your Aunt Susan, my dear-her as went off in a decline twelve year last Michaelmas."

"I shouldn't wonder if Annie was to go into a decline one o' these days," remarked Selina, impartially surveying her offspring; "she do favour her father. Now there was Ethel, she took after me-a fine big girl she was. If it hadn't been along of the scarlatina I could ha' reared Ethel; but the others, they were born for the churchyard, as you may say."

Meantime her brother-in-law was slowly working a bundle of soiled letters and several dingy flat leather cases out of his breast-pocket.

"You know as poor George wrote to me to come and fetch Annie?" he asked.

Selina did not know it. Like many a man who has something more valuable to dispose of than a little daughter, he had waited till he himself was safe inside the fortress of the grave before giving the signal for that battle which too often rages round testamentary dispositions.

But Selina was not altogether inclined to fight. She stood silent for a few minutes, with her eyes on the floor, rapidly reviewing the position. For all she knew her brother-in-law might have a legal claim upon Annie, in which case it was best to make a virtue of necessity. At any rate, was it worth her while to keep the girl? No. If she had favoured Selina it would have been different; but there was an innate respectability about Annie which made her an irksome companion to her

mother, and likely to be more plague than profit in the career which the latter had sketched out for herself. Yet it would be foolish to display too much alacrity in getting rid of her daughter, and so lose the chance of a little money down as the price of that maternal sacrifice.

"Well, to be sure," she whimpered, making a pad of a dirty handkerchief, to receive the expected tears; "if it ain't hard on a poor widow to have her only girl taken away from her, just as she's getting of an age to be useful.

"It's for her good, Mrs. George; you know as it is."

"My only child to be taken away from me, and me left without a soul to speak to, and she such a one for her needle! Why times and times she've earned eighteenpence a day mending socks and gentlemen's under-linen."

This statement was inaccurate, and there was a short thrust and parry of looks between child and mother.

James Pontin had carefully opened two dog-eared letters and laid them on the table before his sister-in-law; but her eyes ran over them to fix on the smaller crisper bit of paper he was slowly flattening out on the table. His fingers lingered regretfully upon it; it was a serious business in these hard times to part with five pounds; but the Pontins had always done the handsome thing by each other, and having once paid a sum down, he meant to have done with Selina.

"It's all for her good," he repeated slowly. "And look'ee, Mrs. George, you're welcome to this here fi'-pun note-I'll be bound it'll cover twice over any loss there'll be to you in the matter. But mind you, you won't get no more, not till kingdom come." The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the note was in Selina's hand and her handkerchief in her pocket.

"I dessay it will be all for her good, as you was saying, Mr. Pontin," she said briskly. "You'll call for her pretty early to-morrow, I expect."

"You don't suppose as I'm a-going to sleep the night in Lon'on," he rejoined, with an emphasis that was almost indignation. "Why, I'm pretty nigh choked with the place already-besides, Lord knows what live creatures I might be taking back into Aunt's feather beds. No-since parting's to be, you may as well part with her to-day as to-morrow. I reckon it won't take Annie long to put her bits of things together; and if so be the train's running, we'll get back home afore dark."

"You hear that, Annie? You look sharp, now," said the bereaved mother, tightening the worn elastic of an old purse over the fivepound note.