"No, I do not," she answered. "She is so different from dearest uncle, and I feel so out of place somehow among them. I cannot tell at times what I ought to do, and I have no one to advise me."

"Make me your mother confessor, and perhaps I can help you," said Catherine, pressing her hand kindly against her warm, comfortable side; and Patricia thought to herself, "If I had known my own mother I should have felt for her as I feel for Miss Fletcher."

"I want you to look on this as a kind of outside home, and on us as your unregistered relations," said Catherine. "We have known your family so long that you do not come to us as a stranger, and both Henry and myself are prepared to take you to our hearts. Do you hear? You are to come to us in your troubles, and give us your confidence and love. We will help you with our advice, child; and love always does good-both to those who give and those who receive."

She said this just as they reached the Hollies' gate. It was a good omen for the disturbed young soul needing enlightenment and the living warmth of friendly direction as it did.

CHAPTER XVI.

BY PRINCIPLE.

THE Fletchers were people with principles and ideas of which they did not only talk, but by which they lived. It was not enough for them to eat, drink, and be decorously merry; to pay their tithes and taxes as gentlefolks should; to keep to the broad way of elemental morality; to do little acts of charity out of their accumulated balance, by which they sacrificed nothing they desired to possess, but, under the idea that they had, counting off all their possible purchases as so many offerings cast into the treasury of the Lord; but they were people who had taken to themselves the great law of duty, and who had set out to live up to their ideal.

They went to first principles and did not give much weight to expediency. They did not believe that because things are they must therefore be upheld, and they were not afraid of the right even if iconoclastic and subversive. To be sure they knew that it is always troublesome, and at times personally damaging, to maintain the right of God in the face of the wrong of society; but they thought life meant ever trouble in some shape or other, especially in the difficulties which beset endeavour, and they deferred their lotus-eating to another sphere.

The great facts cherished by them were, the honour due to humanity irrespective of social condition, and the duty of the strong to help the weak. Hence their own lives were organised on a plan of almost patriarchal simplicity of manners and habits, and they dedicated more

than the prescribed tenth to their poorer brethren. They were laughed at of course, and sometimes more than laughed at; Milltown was not the kind of place where they were likely to find sympathisers; but they took their own way as tranquilly and steadfastly as if society had crowned them with roses not thorns, and right for right's sake was a law good enough for them by which to live.

Yet they were very different each from the other, for all their sympathy and harmony of views and circumstance. Woman-like, she had the more arbitrary singleness of logic in her feelings, and carried out her views to their ultimate where he discerned an opposing law. She had more passion in her love for those she admired; but then she brought the same warmth of nature into her dislikes. He, a man without much weakness of soul or flesh, was therefore possessed of a certain philosophical pity for frailty of all kinds, which never grew to anger save when the question of wrongdoing was one of oppression; and then he was implacable. But as a rule he took things more quietly than she did; striving to get to the roots of a man's action, searching for the physiological causes, the influencing circumstances, where others, and she too at times, condemned only the fact. This made him eminently just. Not the justice which means legality, retributive punishment, and the like; but the ability to see all round a question, and to decide on it according to its rootwork and surroundings. Thus no one could count on him as a partisan irrespective of justice; by which it came about that he had the knack of offending all sides in turn because he would not be unfair to any. The popular verdict on this brother and sister was, that he was the more mischievous of the two, and she the more foolish.

They were both hard students, and knew many things outside the ordinary grooves of education. The one luxury they allowed themselves in their simply-appointed home was the luxury of books and scientific appliances. They had a first-class microscope and a firstclass telescope, which last they had fitted up in a rude but efficient observatory that excited more ridicule than admiration by its cunning contrivances of little cost. The subject too, met with as little sympathy as the method by which it was followed. People said with a sneer they supposed the learned doctor was devising a new system of astronomy which was to upset the Newtonian; and because he busied himself with certain biological experiments, which included boiled flasks, infused hay, and a cloud of moving creatures as the result, they asked him if the old axiom ex nihilo nihil fit was all a mistake, and was dead matter God?

All these studies were taken to be a kind of flying in the face of Providence; and when, tempted by the desire to let a little light in upon those brains which seemed to him to cherish their darkness too fondly, he suffered himself to mention any facts bearing on the great

scientific questions of the day, the after-summary was invariably set in the one unchanging key-the doctor was an infidel, and his conversation was absolutely impious. Add to this, essentially "radical" political doctrines, of which the Milltown translation was that he and his sister were "known to be socialists, red republicans of the deepest dye, wanting an equal division of property, and desirous of pulling down king, lords, and commons to the one muddy level of unwashed ruffianism,” and it may be imagined that for people who valued truth they had sometimes rather a hard time of it.

Strange to say, with all this they were not entirely approved of by the class they upheld, and not personally unpopular with the class they offended. The peasantry and little people in country places like to feel the gentry far above them. They do not care to be caught up into the empyrean of an equal humanity, but enjoy the poetry of their self-abasement in the belief that their superiors are indeed their betters. They think that those who treat them with respect lower themselves to their own level, and would rather their gods came about them, awful and effulgent, carrying their lightning in their hands and their crowns about their brows, than as simple men and women benign and unarmed. They liked the good things which came to them from the Demeter of the Hollies; and the women, when in personal trouble of sickness, sorrow, or dire necessity, turned instinctively to her as possessed of all knowledge and all healing power; but in daily matters they would rather not have been made to sit in her presence; they were bothered by her advice as to the management of their children; her recipes for cooking puzzled them; and the way in which she opened windows and doors in cases of fever and the like seemed to them barbarous and downright heathenish, as well as murderous.

So too, her insisting on cleanliness and fresh air in her tenants more than compensated for the low rent at which Miss Fletcher's cottages were let; and their undeniable superiority in wholesomeness was paid for, they thought, by the greater extent of surface there was to keep clean, and the fidfads, called improvements, which were not wanted and seldom properly managed.

All of which she and her brother knew well enough. But when twitted with the old simile of the pearls and the swine by those who held to class degradation as the righteous ordering of society, and who thought that class ignorance is and should be irremovable in the lower for the greater convenience of the higher, they used to answer quietly: "The less such things as we have grown to consider the first necessities of decent living are appreciated by our poorer brothers, the more pressing our duty of educating them up to that point of appreciation."

But the doctrine did not take.

The Fletchers got the lash on all sides. If a man was too poor to

send his children to school and they paid for him, as they were sure to do, his neighbours, just able with hard pinching to pay for theirs, railed at the cunning which knew how to get the length of grand folks' feet for the one part, and at the simpleness which let that length be got at for the other; while the Milltown gentry, who to a man disliked the scheme of educating the poor, denounced "those Fletcher fools" as playing the very mischief with class usefulness and parental responsibility. If, they said, a man brings children into the world for whom he cannot provide, he must suffer for it through them; and to assist him by assisting his little ones was to go against the laws of God himself.

When winter came, and with it supplies of food and clothes and firing from the Hollies as surely as the frost and snow, those whose alpha of political economy was that the weaker must go the wall in the press, and suffer that the strong may be made glad, and whose omega was the sin of charity, declared that the place was becoming revolutionary by his wickedness and pauperized by her folly, and that soon every gentleman would have to make himself a beggar that the beggars might be gentlemen. When they bought up small tenements and lowered the rents, such men as Colonel Lowe, whose tumble-down hovels stood at a rack-rent, said they ought to be prosecuted for interfering with market values; and when they lent money to small landowners, to prevent the necessity of selling their little farms and fields, Mr. Hamley, who had the land-hunger on him, had been heard to say with an oath that this tampering with the natural flow of capital and land ought to be made as actionable as the lowered rents, and that some day" Yon hound Fletcher would find himself in the wrong box, and the Lord make it hot for him!"

No Milltown lady would take a servant from the Hollies. To be sure there were not many opportunities, for the place was good and sometimes the maids were wise. But sometimes they were not, and preferred change for the sake of change to the loving home they had found under Miss Fletcher. And then their chances in Milltown were but slender. The ladies said they were spoilt by over-indulgence, and were good for nothing after they had passed through Miss Fletcher's hands. Even the labourers who worked for them at odd times had difficulty in finding jobs on the off-days; employers disliking the contrast between the wages given at the Hollies and those prescribed by the labour-market, and resenting the surplusage as a wrong done to themselves who did not choose to give so much. This too was counted to the Fletchers for unrighteousness; and because they were the friends of the poor they were held to be the enemies of the rich, and condemned as undermining the rights of capital in proportion as they recognised the rights of labour.

But haunted by that odd resolve of theirs to do the absolute right

as between man and man, seeing everywhere Humanity and nowhere social arrangements, they cared for none of the hard names wherewith they were assailed. When society was unjust, they stepped in with their reconciling measures, and they found their reward in the worth of the things they did, not in the euphony of the verdict with which the world received them. They lived neither for praise nor for thanks, but for humanity and the right; but they had to bear their cross in return, this being just the line to which society is ever most fiercely inimical.

These then, were Patricia Kemball's new friends, and the as yet unknown sphere of thought and feeling into which she was to be introduced.

When the door was opened and they went in, the girl was struck by the house as different from anything she had ever seen before. Her old home at Barsands had been bare and rugged, scrupulously clean, but as plain as the old Holdfast itself. Abbey Holme was rich with gold and crimson, elaborate ornamentation, large tracts of mirror, huge vases of modern French porcelain, papier-maché chairs and tables, and a great deal of bright steel, cut glass, and showy pictures. It was filled with size and glitter rather than beauty-a house of first-class upholstery, resplendent in its way, but that way one wherein both art and harmony were made subservient to expense; and it was singularly unhomelike, and though monotonous destitute of all which gives the sensation of comfort or rest. The Hollies was simple, but strangely quaint and beautiful; for beauty was part of the Fletchers' religion of life: only it was beauty that did not with them necessarily include costliness. The materials were everywhere inexpensive but the colours were pure and harmonious. The ornaments were few but of good design and workmanship; books made up much of the wall furniture; and, though it was winter, flowers and growing plants were in pots and hanging baskets about the windows. There was evidently a central idea in the arrangements of the various rooms and passages. Incongruous things were not massed together without regard to epoch, style, intention, as is the rule with most houses; but each thing seemed to fall naturally in the place where it was put, and if aught had been removed the rest would have been imperfect. And yet, with all this artistic exactness of arrangement, the house had the free possibilities of homeliness and comfort. The tables were for use not show; and with rooms not half the size of those at Abbey Holme there was more than double the space available.

The effect of the whole was old-fashioned and un-English. This last was due partly to the wooden structural chimney-pieces, built up with shelves and pigeon-holes for bits of old china, where the lookingglass belonging was set deep in the shadow, lightening what else would have been a dark space, but not obtrusive as a universal