and all forgive and forget: and pray God for our enemies as well as our friends. He maketh His sun to shine on the just and on the unjust-and we may well afford to be charitable to failure! So good-bye again,' shaking his hand which she had been holding warmly clasped during the whole of her oration; and forgive me if I have spoken to you too roughly. You see, I don't go in for smooth speeches myself, and you are aggravating. Good-bye. Don't come out. Well, if you must, give Baby your arm. By-by, Dimples. Have a care of sparks, else maybe you'll singe those pretty wings of yours some day.'

Which last words brought her to the door, and to the portico. Settling her sister in the carriage, arranging the dust-shawl about her knees, and seeing that the cushions were in the exact place for her best comfort, she mounted her own higher seat; and planting her feet firmly against the splash-board, took the reins with the air of a coachman driving a four-in-hand, and, raising her whip by way of final salute, trotted off down the drive, one of the worthiest souls and least lovable women to be found in the whole of the county.

Just now the unloveliness of her womanhood was a far more prominent fact to Derwent than the worth of her soul, and when he went back to the drawing-room he said fretfully:

'That odious woman! how I hate her visits! Why on earth does she come when she must see that we do not want her! And her crazy preachments about her convict gardener! Really, it would seem as if we were never to hear the last of the subject of criminals, and what we are to forgive, and all the rest of it. One would think we were a colony of felons!'

'You are out of temper, my boy,' said Mrs. Smith. Miss Forbes is right in her views on this question. If she had not fretted you so much, you would see that for yourself.'

'Never, mother, never!' he returned. You can never make me think it so much a matter of indifference, whether a man has done a crime or not, that he has to be forgiven. If crime is evil the criminal must be judged; and with judgment is no mercy. If you take this away you confuse the whole subject, and make right and wrong interchangeable terms. I cannot adopt your view, and never will.'

'Time will show,' said Mrs. Smith, something that looked like tears coming suddenly to her eyes.

CHAPTER XII.

'ROUGH BUT TRUE.'

THAT was Miss Dinah Forbes's description of herself.

'Rough but true,' she used to say with her horse laugh and masculine air; but, as Mrs. Smith thought and Lady Machell said, 'why rough?' To be true was all very well, but truth does not necessarily bring with it a voice like a boatswain's and a stride like a grenadier's, the abandonment of every distinctive sign and quality of feminine gentlehood, and the adoption of a style of which the ultimate outcome was to make a good woman into a bad copy of a man, one of a pure species into a hybrid.

That was Miss Dinah Forbes's weakness. Affecting to despise men as mere selfish animals, physically strong and morally weak, she yet offered them that sincerest flattery of imitation; and, while vaunting the superiority of women, got rid of all that was purely feminine about her as so much impedimenta in the noble strife between right and wrong-so much evidence of weakness and inferiority.

Nevertheless, she was a fine-natured woman, if she had the weakness of wishing to transact her life like a man; and with all her roughness of exterior, all her affectation of rude power and translated manhood, she did a good day's work in her generation, and was one of the most useful members of the Grantley Bourne society.

She went about among the poor, whom she helped to help themselves rather than pauperised by gratuitous charities-save with the old and feeble and overburdened; and to these she gave, she did not lend-she was a crutch for perpetuity, not only a temporary bridge thrown over a bad bit of road. She advocated education so far as reading, writing, and arithmetic went, and for boys and girls alike; but she insisted more on plain needlework and some knowledge of domestic duties for the latter, and she counted more than the three familiar Rs for the former vanity and vexation. She did not want her maids to be fine ladies, she used to say, nor her groom an educated gentleman; she wanted good honest workers who knew their duty and were not above their station. Within this limit then she upheld the schools; saw that the treats and tea-cakes were well managed and sufficient; and made the mothers of the Jacks and Jills who played truant, or were kept at home to mind the baby, smart for the feebleness of their authority or the selfishness of their ordering.

She lectured the farmers on their bad management in field and fallow, and tried to induce them to adopt new lights concerning

subsoil ploughing, top-dressing, drainage, and the value of stiff clays where properly treated: lights which in general they rejected with a few epithets, that could scarcely be called complimentary, flanking Miss Forbes's name when they spoke of her over their pipes among themselves at the Hare and Hounds.' And she lectured the farmers' wives on their bad management in the house, and their ignorance of scientific methods in the poultry yard; and did her best to instil into them correct views on the boiling of potatoes and the uses of soup and a stock-pot, with the good of cleanliness in the pigsties, and of half-picked bones for the fowls. In a word, she bustled and preached and scolded and 6 rallied,' and was the best abused and most influential woman in the place.

One day when she was driving in her pony carriage on one of her usual rounds, to call here on the Constantines and there on Farmer Pike, she came upon a wan, haggard, miserable-looking man standing by the wayside, his hollow eyes fixed on the dusty road as if thinking. He was not a bad-looking man, but neither had he a pleasant countenance. His look was of the kind called furtive, one that never met his fellows frankly; but the face was not brutal; and as for that sidelong glance, it might be ingrained dishonesty and shiftiness, but it might also be timidity and nervousness; and Miss Forbes, for all her pseudo-masculinity, was woman enough to give a fellow-creature the benefit of the doubt when she could make one. And she gave this man the benefit of the doubt now.

She stopped her pony.

'I don't know you, and yet your face is not quite strange to me,' she said in her loud, full-bodied voice. Where do you come from?'

'Deane, my lady,' said the man. Deane was a village about ten miles off, of which the brother of the Tower ladies was the rector. 'And beg pardon, my lady,' he continued, but I know yours and the other lady's. You are Miss Forbes, sister of our rector.' 'Who are you, then?' she asked.

'Bob Rushton, my lady,' he said meekly.

'Bob Rushton!-Bob Rushton!' she repeated; what do I know of you? Oh, I remember! sent to gaol for stealing lead. And so you've worked your time out, have you, and are in the world again with another chance?'

'I have my leave,' he said. 'When did you come out?'

'Last week, my lady,' he answered, nervously plucking at his shabby cap.