leave, you know--and then we'll go to Mrs. Lakeman's."

"Who is she?"

"Her father was a bishop," Mr. Vincent said. He spoke as if the fact needed some contemplation, and to Margaret it did, since she had never seen a bishop in her life. She knew that he wore lawn sleeves and a shovel hat, and was a great man; she had a vague idea that he lived in a cathedral and slept in his mitre. "He died a good many years ago," Mr. Vincent continued, with a jerk in his voice. "He gave me a living when I was a young man; but I resigned it after a year or two, and differences of opinion caused quarrels and separations. Perhaps," he added, rather grimly, "Hannah would have called me a Papist then, and think it nearly as bad as being an unbeliever now."

Mr. Vincent looked at Margaret two or three times as they drove down to Chelsea Embankment. A village dressmaker had made her frock, but it set well on her slim young figure, and the lace at her neck was soft and real; it belonged to her mother, who knew nothing of its value; her hat was perfectly simple, a peasant, or a woman of fashion might have worn it, and it seemed to him that Margaret would fall quite naturally into place with either. Then he thought of his wife at the farm; she had lived so simple a life among the growths of the earth and the changes of the sky that she was wholly untainted by the vulgarities of the world, and such as she was herself she had made her daughter.

The hansom stopped before a new-looking red-brick house.

"George Stringer would say it ought to be blown up with gunpowder," Mr. Vincent remarked, and Margaret, turning to give some trivial answer, saw that he was white and nervous.

The door was opened by a man servant. The hall was panelled; there were rugs and pictures and palms and old china about, and her heart beat quicker, for all this was part of the London show. The drawing-room was part of it, too, with its couches and screens, its pictures and Venetian glass and countless things of a sort that had no place at Woodside Farm. It was all still and dim, too, almost mysterious, and scented with early spring flowers put about in masses, or so it seemed to Margaret.

Some curtains separated a further room; they were drawn together, and against them, clutching them with one hand, as if she were waiting and half afraid, a woman stood. She was tall, and about forty-three. Her figure was still slight; her black dress trailed on the floor, and made her look 

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