indeed, one seldom does, unless there is a story which some old postmaster or old pensioned coachman will tell you, over the pipes and grog, after the cricket-club dinner. Silcote stood amazed. He had his suspicions at once-the man lived on suspicion; but he was a gentleman, in speech at all events.

"I beg your pardon. I was not aware there was a lady here. I beg your pardon."

"There is no lady here; no semblance of one. I am merely an honest and respectable, perfectly honest and respectable, peasant woman. You may see me working in the fields any day, 'stooping and straddling in the clogging fallows.' Let me observe that you have shut yourself up from the world too much, or you would never have accused me of being a lady. Ladies, as far as I can judge from my limited experience of them, don't speak to gentlemen as I spoke to you just now."

"May I ask you a question, ma'am?" said Silcote, still lost in wonder.

A dozen, if you choose."

"And get a dozen refusals of answer. Well and good, but will you answer this one out of the imaginary dozen? I will only ask you one, and I ask it. Who are you?"

"Exactly what I said before. A peasant's daughter, who worked in the fields, who became dairymaid when her father became cowman; who, in consequence of her great beauty, I believe" (here she drew herself up, and proudly, but frankly and honestly, looked at Silcote with the great brown eyes of hers), "became lady's maid to Lady Caroline Poyntz, now Duchess of Cheshire. Those Poyntz girls would have everything handsome about them. Then there came a paradise of folly: no, not folly; true love and good intentions are not folly. And then I turned peasant again, and then I went back to my old work, and you passed me the other day, scowling like your old self, while I was setting beans. Now, what did you please to want here, Silcote?"

The Squire finding, after a good many years, some one who was not a bit afraid of him, answered civilly and to the purpose.

"The fact is, that this boy of yours behaved very pluckily last night. I want to better him. I will take him into the stable as a helper, and he will rise. It is a provision for him. These Cockney servants I get from Reading never stay. Tom, who will be my heir, has taken a fancy to him; in fact, brought him home last night. He will be stud-groom, and will be provided for for life. Will you let him come?"

"No. Let him stick to his sheep. I, you see, know more of domestic service than most, and my answer is, 'No.' Let him freeze and bake on the hillside with his sheep. Let him stay up late with his team, and then get out of his warm bed in the biting winter weather to feed them again at four. Let him do hedge and ditch work on food which a Carolina negro would refuse; let him plough the heaviest clay until the public-house becomes a heaven and a rest to him; let him mow until the other mowers find him so weak that he must mow with them no longer, lest he ruin the contract; let him reap until his loudtongued wife can beat him at that for he must marry, O Lord, for he must marry, and in his own station too; let him go on at the plough tail; among the frozen turnips, among the plashy hedgesides, until the inevitable rheumatism catches him in the back, and the parish employs him on the roads to save the rates; and then, when his wife dies, let them send him to the house, and let him rot there and be buried in a box: but he shall not be a domestic servant for all that, Silcote. I know too much about that. We have vices enough of our own, without requiring yours."

Silcote had nothing more to say-to her, at least. What he had to say he said to himself as he went home.

"That is a devil of a woman. She is all wrong, but she puts it so well. I never saw such a deuce of a woman in my life."

So two violent ill-regulated souls struck themselves together in consequence of this poaching raid, to the great benefit of both.

CHAPTER XI

IN WHICH JAMES BEGINS HIS CAREER.

ALGERNON'S children had departed from London. Captain Tom, having had the confessed moiety of his debts paid, was at Dublin with his regiment. Arthur was back at his tutor work; no one was left with the Squire but the golden-haired child Anne.

Once Silcote had a son, some say the best loved of all, who rebelled against him and his hard strained authority and coarse words, and left his house in high disdain, casting him off with scorn, and rendering the breach between them utterly irreparable by marrying a small tradesman's daughter. He got some small clerkship in Demerara, where he died in a very few years-as men who suddenly wrench up every tie and association are apt to die-of next to nothing. His pretty and good little wife followed him soon, and Anne was left to the mercies of a kind sea captain who had brought them over. The first intimation which Silcote had of his son's death was finding a seafaring man waiting in his hall one day with a bright little girl of about three years old. Silcote heard the story of his son's death in dead silence, accepted the child, and then coolly began to talk on indifferent nautical matters with the astounded mariner. He kept him to lunch, plied him with rare and choice liquor of every kind, and was so flippant and noisy, that the bemuddled sailor quitted the house under the impression that Silcote was the most unfeeling brute he had ever met in his life. It was Silcote's humour that he should think so, and he had his wish.

From this time she was never allowed to leave him. He was never ostentatiously affectionate to her before other people, but they must have had a thoroughly good understanding in private, this queer couple, for she was not only not a bit afraid of him, but absolutely devoted to him. She

was never thwarted or contradicted in any way, and so no wonder she loved him.

Such treatment and such an education would have spoilt most children. Anne was a good deal spoilt, but not more so than was to have been expected. She used to have bad days,-days in which everything went wrong with her; days which were not many hours old when her maid would make the discovery, and announce it pathetically, that Miss had got out of bed the wrong side. We will resume her acquaintance on one of these days, and see her at her worst.

Silcote hated the servants to speak to him unless he spoke first, and then, like most men who shut themselves from the world, would humiliate himself by allowing them to talk any amount of gossip and scandal with him. Anne's conduct had, however, been so extremely outrageous this morning, that, when Silcote had finished his breakfast, had brooded and eaten his own heart long enough, and ordered Anne to be sent to him to go out walking, the butler gratuitously informed him, without waiting for any encouragement to speak, that "Miss was uncommon naughty this morning, and had bit the Princess."

"What has she been worrying the child about? The child don't bite me. Fetch her here."

Anne soon appeared, dressed for walking, in a radiant and saintlike frame of mind. She was so awfully good and agreeable that any one but that mole Silcote would have seen that she was too good by half. One of the ways by which Silcote tried to worry himself into Bedlam (and he would have succeeded, but for the perfect healthiness of his constitution) was this, he would take up an imaginary grievance against some one, and exasperate himself about it until he was half mad. Any one who gives himself up to the vice of self-isolation, as Silcote had for so many years, may do the same; may bring more devils swarming about his ears than ever buzzed and flapped round the cell of a hermit. He did so on this occasion. He got up in his own mind a perfectly imaginary case against the poor long-suffering Princess for ill-using Anne, and went, muttering and scowling, out for his morning's walk, with Anne, wonderfully agreeable and exquisitely good, beside him.

They went into the flower-garden first, and Anne, with sweet innocence, asked if she might pick some flowers. Of course he said Yes; and, after walking up and down for a quarter of an hour, the head-gardener came to him, and respectfully gave him warning. When Silcote looked round, he frankly asked the man to withdraw his warning, and told him that he would be answerable it did not occur again. Anne had distinguished herself. In a garden, kept as M'Croskie kept that at Silcote's, you can soon do twenty pounds' worth of damage. Anne had done some thirty. Thunbergias, when clumsily gathered, are apt to come up by the root, and you may pull up a bed before you get a satisfactory bunch. Araucarias, some of them, form very tolerable backs for bouquets, but they were very expensive then. Also, if you pull away hap-hazard at a bed of firstclass fuchsias, have a rough-and-tumble fight with a Scotch terrier in a bed of prize calceolarias, and end by a successful raid on the orchis-house, destroying an irreplaceable plant for every blossom you pluck, you will find that thirty pounds won't go very far, and that no conscientious gardener will stay with you. Anne had done all this, and

more.

Silcote got the head-gardener to withdraw his resignation; and then, keeping hold of Anne's hand, passed on to the stable-yard without having attempted any remonstrance with her. If she had burnt the house down, it would have been just the same. As he stood at that time he was a perfect fool. Hard hit, years and years ago, in a tender place, he had, as he expressed it, "fled from the world," from the world which was spinning all round him. He had brought himself to confess that he had been unjust and hard to this child's father, and he was, in his way, atoning for it by ruining the child by over-indulgence, as he had ruined her father by selfish ill-temper. It is hardly worth talking about. When a man takes to revenging himself on the whole world for the faults of one or two by withdrawing himself into utter selfishness, his folly takes so many forms that it gets unprofitable to examine them in detail. Let us leave Silcote reading his Heine and his Byron, and let him, as much as possible, speak for himself