him since he had shown more tact. Uncouth as he was in some ways, Lady Maud knew that she herself might {67} care for him more than as a friend, if her heart were not buried for ever in a soldier's grave on the Veldt.

{67}

That was the worst of it. She felt that it was probably not beyond her power to bring about what Van Torp desired, at least so far as to induce Margaret to break off the engagement which now blocked his way. Under cover of roughness, too, he had argued with a subtlety that frightened her now that she was alone; and with a consummate knowledge of her nature he had offered her the only sort of bribe that could possibly tempt her, the means to make permanent the good work she had already carried so far.

He had placed her in such a dilemma as she had never dreamed of. To accept such an offer as he made, would mean that she must do something which she felt was dishonourable, if she gave 'honour' the meaning an honest gentleman attaches to it, and that was the one she had learned from her father, and which a good many women seem unable to understand. To refuse, was to deprive hundreds of wretched and suffering creatures of the only means of obtaining a hold on a decent existence which Lady Maud had ever found to be at all efficacious. She knew that she had not done much, compared with what was undone; it looked almost nothing. But where law-making had failed altogether, where religion was struggling bravely but almost in vain, where enlightened philanthropy found itself paralysed and bankrupt, she had accomplished something by merely using a little money in the right way.

'You can do quite a great deal of good with forty thousand pounds a year.' {68}

{68}

Van Torp's rough-hewn speech rang through her head, and somehow its reckless grammar gave it strength and made it stick in her memory, word for word. In the drawer of the writing-table before which she was sitting there was a little file of letters that meant more to her than anything else in the world, except one dear memory. They were all from women, they all told much the same little story, and it was good to read. She had made many failures, and some terrible ones, which she could never forget; but there were real successes, too, there were over a dozen of them now, and she had only been at work for three years. If she had more money, she could do more; if she had much, she could do much; and she knew of one or two women who could help her. What might she not accomplish in a lifetime with the vast 

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