Carola

In one of the London streets lying along the riverside there was, some years ago, a small shop, perhaps the smallest shop in London, for the tenant of it, when standing in the centre, could touch each wail with his outstretched hand. Over the narrow doorway, which with a window two feet wide filled up the whole frontage, was painted the name Matthias Levi; and in the window-sill and up each side of the window-frame were ranged old boots and shoes of every size, which old Matthias Levi had mended and patched, and was in this way offering for sale.

Small as the shop was, there was plenty of room within for a cobbler's stall, and there the old Jew was always at work, from time to time lifting up his bended head to take a kindly glance at the people passing along the pavement, or at the great waggons blocking up the narrow street. He was never seen without an old cap of brown seal-skin, in shape like a turban, which came down low on his high and narrow forehead, almost touching the shaggy grey eyebrows hanging over his deep-set eyes. All his teeth were gone, and his mouth fell in, but there was a placid smile resting upon it which had something of the charm of childhood. If a customer came in his wrinkled face beamed with pleasure; and he was as earnest in seeking out the best pair of mended shoes to fit his feet as if those feet were his own. Not a few children went into that little shop barefoot, and came out shod without Matthias being a penny the richer.

In one corner of his dark den a spiral iron staircase, no broader than a ladder, ascended to the room overhead. This was larger than the shop, for it extended over an archway, which led down between two warehouses to the riverside. It was the old Jew's living-room and bedchamber in one, and was but scantily furnished. In the corner of it opposite to the spiral staircase stood a ladder, with a trap-door at the top of it, leading to a garret above. This garret, which had no other way of entrance than through the Jew's shop and dwelling-place, was rented by him to such tenants as were willing to put up with this inconvenience. The three rooms were taken out of an old and dingy warehouse with a rotten-looking landing-stage on the river-bank, which had once probably been a busy spot, but which had now fallen into hands that did but little trade, and only kept the place in auth repair as prevented it tumbling into ruins.

The attic was still larger than old Matthias. Levi's dwelling-place, for it ran back towards the river, and had a low broad window looking out upon it. Half the panes were broken and stuffed up with old rags, very much obscuring the light as it struggled to reach the dark corners which were made by the tilted angles of the roof. In one of these, almost on the floor, was a low bedstead with a torn and dirty quilt covering it. The furniture was still more scanty than in the room below, for there was but one chair, one table, and one old box, and a shelf against the wall holding a little crockery and a tin saucepan, whilst a half-full sack of coals and a bundle of chips stood near the trap-door on a spot closely grimed with coal-dust. With the exception of this corner, which was plainly in a hopeless condition, the floor was tolerably clean, and such glass as was left in the window-frame was fairly bright.

There were two persons living in this garret: a woman nearly eighty and a girl not yet eighteen.

The girl had never known a time when she had not been left to herself. Her father died before her birth, and her mother had followed him before the child had memory to recollect her; the only trace of her existence was that she had called her baby Carola, probably because she had seen some barge with that name sailing past the window. The old woman, Carola's grandmother, had never quitted the garret where she lived since the child had been old enough to send out on errands, and this had come to pass at a very early age, for her wants were as simple as the furniture of her room. All she asked of life was a crust of bread and half a bottle of gin a day. As long as Carola could remember, these requirements had been duly met. Every other day the crooked, shining fingers of the old woman fumbled into a mysterious pocket among her rags, and produced the price of a bottle of gin and a loaf of bread. The loaf was chiefly for the girl, but the gin was altogether for the old woman. When these errands were done Carola was free to do as she liked, and go where she pleased.

It was an active out-of-door life, full of change and stir; in and out of the gin-palaces, with their crowds of drunken men and women, and-up and down the riverside, among cursing and swearing riverside dwellers. Nothing escaped Carola's quick eyes and ears; and every day was full of new interest to her. Of any place in the world beyond the two or three streets near her home she knew nothing, or that any other kind of life could be lived but that of the rough people around her. Her existence was, on the whole, like that of some wild creature; eating when she was hungry if she could get the food, and sleeping when she was tired if she could find a. corner to curl herself up in. At all times she thrust her little figure into every crowd, and stood in the front rank at every street sight. "Carol", as she was called, was a favourite everywhere, and continued to grow in favour. She never entered a gin-shop without having a dram pressed upon her; and the lads who rowed their boats fearlessly amid the confusion of steamers and barges on the river were always willing to take "Carol" with them. She knew all the evil from which most girls are guarded, and but little of the good in which most girls are cradled.

But, however ragged little Carola might be, her feet were always warmly shod, and however neglected by all else, old Matthias Levi did his best to guard her from harm. His heart was, in fact, bound up in her. She was as the apple of his eye, though in the frosty reserve which old age had gathered around him he was bound as in fetters of iron, and could neither talk much to her, nor was able to draw out the child's chatter. But as she passed in and out, ascending and descending his iron staircase, she was constantly under his eye, and often exchanged a few words with him. As Carola grew older and her grandmother more infirm, the discharge of the Sabbath duties fell to her. She was not more than eight years old when she began to light the lamp and kindle the fire for him on a Sabbath eve, when his law forbade him to touch them himself. And as she grew old enough he taught her, with some little austerity of manner, softened by a generous supply of sugar-plums, the Ten Commandments.

"They're good laws," he said, "and it 'ud be good for you to keep them, Carol; though you're not one of my people, my dear."

But as Carola went to and fro about the street, mixing with the lowest of the people, she found that not one of these laws was ever thought of. Yet there was something in the sound of the solemn words which stirred the depths of her childish heart. Every night she stood with her hands behind her in front of the old man, who laid aside his awl and needle to listen, whilst she repeated them in a clear, sweet, serious voice, before going up the ladder which led to her grandmother's garret.

For the only restraint in Carola's life was that of the necessity of coming home at nine o'clock, when Matthias Levi shut up his shop, and fastened the door with a heavy iron bar, as if all his shoes were made of gold. As the only access to the garret lay through his premises, Carola could not stay out later in the streets. Till the very last moment she would linger among her companions, loath to return to the dismal attic which was her only home; but when the clocks struck nine she had to flee, and rush, breathless with her running, into the dark little shop. How good this restraint was for her she did not know till many years had gone by.

Once a week the old Jew underwent a strange and solemn change in Carola's eyes. This was on a Friday evening, when he exchanged his seal-skin cap for a hat of a peculiar shape, and drew about his shoulders his white-and-blue prayer-robe, which his father had brought with him from Poland. She could hear him saying words she could not understand, as she peeped down at him from her trap-door in the ceiling of his room, and watched until the long prayers were ended, and the old man laid aside his Sabbath dress, and sat down in his old familiar guise.

"What do you do that for?" asked Carola one Friday evening, after an unusually long, prayer, as she crept half-way down the ladder, ready to retreat quickly if the strange old man was angry.

"They're good words as the wise men of my people have taught us to say," he replied.

"I used to know partly what they meant, but I've forgotten what it is, now I'm old. But they are pleasing to Him," he added with a mysterious gesture, as he lifted up his hand and pointed through the window to the small portion of the sky visible through it.

"Would they do me any good?" inquired the child.

"They're good words for man," answered Matthias with a grave dignity, "but woman no call to say them; and you're not one of our women. No, they'd do you no good, my dear, if I could teach them to you."

"Women that aren't Jews, does He like them?" asked Carola, pointing up to the sky.

"P'raps He do, p'raps He do," he replied in a caressing tone. "He loves the Jews, and has chosen them out of all people; but I think He'd love a little girl like you if you keep them ten laws I've taught you."

"Is it good to lie in bed all day, and drink gin?" she inquired shrewdly.

"There's nought against it in them laws," he said; "and it don"t make much difference to folks that are only English, and not Jews as well. But you take care, Carol, and keep all these laws, and p'raps you'll be reckoned as a Jew when the great judgment comes. I don"t know much about it, my dear, for I was not one of the wise men, and they never asked me to read in the Synagogue; but there's no harm done by keeping His laws."

Matthias had never said so much, or spoken so earnestly to her before; and Carola climbed back to the garret, and lay down beside her drunken old grandmother, firmly resolved to keep all those laws which Matthias had taught her. By dint of listening with all her might every Sabbath eve to the half-audible prayers mumbled by the old Jew, she caught up a few Hebrew words, which she used to repeat in a low whisper, standing at the garret window, and looking up steadfastly to the quiet sky which hung above the busy river.

Whilst Carola was only a little child the old Jew could guard her from many evils; but as she grew older his anxieties for her became graver. Fortunately, when she was about twelve years of age, a school inspector tracked the wild street-girl to her home, and insisted upon her going to school. Upon this, Matthias took her to a small Jewish day-school in the neighbourhood, where she quickly learned to read, and read with intelligence and ease. But, as soon as she could shake off these shackles, she returned to the free and dangerous life of the streets, with its constant changes and its exciting events. Many an hour the old cobbler, sitting at his stall, brooded painfully over the perils to which Carola was exposed. She was growing up into a beautiful girl, with fine dark eyes and an abundance of dark hair, which hung, tangled and unkempt, over a white broad forehead. She was getting ashamed and impatient of her ragged clothing, which hitherto had given her no concern, and nothing made her eyes sparkle with pleasure so much as when Matthias bought her some bright bit of ribbon or some cheap trinket from the Jewish pedlars who called now and then at his shop-door. It was very evident to Matthias that more lads hung about the place than when Carola was a mere child; and even his angriest remonstrances could not prevent the girl from standing at the street corner, laughing and chaffing with them. Worse than all, the girl was unfortunately growing fond of the spirits her grandmother lived upon; and of late she had come in more than once with an unsteady step and glistening eyes, which had struck horror into the heart of the old Jew, who was as abstemious as most Jews are.

"Oh, Carol, Carol!" he cried, one evening, with tears in his deep-set eyes; "whatever will become of you if you don't keep yourself from goin' bad?"

"Why, I'm keepin' all those laws you've taught me!" she exclaimed, turning round and gazing at him with a startled look. "I never swear, nor steal, nor nothin', like all the rest of 'em; and I stay indoors all the time you keep Sabbath, though it makes me mis'rable. If I'm goin' bad, it isn't much use to keep those laws."

"But you go to the vaults, Carol," he said anxiously, yet timidly; "and folks are fond of you, and they give you more drink than a young girl like you ought to have; and you run about the streets too much for a pretty girl like you. Stay at home more, my dear."

"Stay at home!" she echoed, with a wild laugh that was sad to him to hear; "stay at home with nobody but grandmother, and she lyin' in bed, and drink, drink, drinkin' all day! Oh, I'd soon take to drinkin' like her if I'd nothing else to do. I must run about the streets, Matthias. I couldn't live in that old hole and never go out, like her. I'd rather be dead and in the grave, I would."

"Couldn't you get some work to do?" he asked.

"She won't hear a word of leavin' her to earn money for myself," said Carola; "she cries and says I don't love her; and one of the laws says, 'Honour thy father and thy mother'. That means grandmother as well, doesn't it?"

Matthias bent his head gravely.

"So I mustn't disobey her," continued Carola, "and I'm mis'rable, and I hate myself in these dirty old rags of clothes, and I can't ever forget them, only when I just take a little drop to drink, and then it doesn't seem to matter so much, and I feel almost like a little girl again. But don't you be afeard for me," she went on, looking affectionately into the old Jew's dim eyes. "I know you'd be troubled if I went wrong, and I'll not go wrong no more than that, if that's wrong for a girl as isn't a Jew. Just that little bit of a way I'll go, but not a bit farther. And that isn't breakin' one o' the commandments, you know."

So nothing could be done by Matthias for Carola as long as her grandmother lived, except to watch over her as closely as he could. There were no more peaceful days for him, except the Sabbath, when he knew that the girl was safe at home, in the garret overhead. Now and then he bought a book for her from the pedlars at the door, and was more than content when she shut herself up with it and never put it down, if it was an interesting book, until she had read it to the last page. But her absorbing life was, out of doors, and as soon as the Sabbath or the book was ended Carola darted out into the streets. Nor was Matthias sure that she would come back when the clock struck nine; she was growing tired of even this slight restraint.

But at length the inevitable end of the drunken old grandmother drew near; and Carola had to remain indoors day after day with the dying woman. The girl could not believe that her grandmother was really going to leave her, and to leave her alone in the world. No neighbour came in to help her in her duties, for to do so they must have passed through Matthias Levi's rooms, and as long as she could remember no stranger's foot had entered them. He fetched a doctor towards the end, for he knew there would be trouble and difficulty if this was neglected; but the doctor only shook his head, and said nothing could be done to prolong the life of the. wretched old woman.

"Give her anything she seems to like," he said.

There was only cue thing the dying creature craved for; and Carola went out late at night to the nearest gin-palace to buy a fresh bottle of gin. She had been sitting in the close atmosphere of the garret all day without food; only now and then sipping the gin-and-water she had poured at intervals down her grandmother's parched throat. The streets were quiet as she sped along them, for in a few minutes all the spirit-vaults would be closed, and those who were drinking late were still, inside their glittering walls, waiting to be turned out at the last moment. Carola's face was bathed with tears, of which she was half proud and half ashamed.

"Take a drop of something to comfort you," said the barmaid sympathisingly. Carola was in no hurry to go back. She felt reluctant to return at once to the dismal and lonely room, where there was nothing to look at but the shrunken and death-stricken face of her old grandmother. Yet she did not care to stay in the streets, dimly-lighted though they were, where she might be seen by any one who would jeer at her grief. When she had almost reached Matthias's door she turned down stealthily along the low passage which led beneath his dwelling to the riverside. The half-ruined landing-stage which was lying in the moonlight seemed to invite her to rest there a little while; and Carola sat down on a block of wood, round which still hung the frayed and ragged fragments of a cable by which boats had once been moored. The night breeze blowing across the river came fresh and cool to her heated face. It was past midnight, and the waning moon was rising into the sky and sending a flickering track of glistening ripples up to her feet. There was a gentle lapping of the water against the landing-stage which had a lulling and soothing sound. A good many vessels lay at anchor higher up the river with lights burning fore and aft; and down east some ship, in full sail, was going out quickly with the tide. But there was scarcely a sound to be heard except the low swish of the water at her feet. A few soft little clouds followed in the wake of the moon, all tinted with golden light; and the rest of the summer sky was scattered over with dim stars. They looked to Carola like eyes heavy with sleep that could watch no longer, like her own.

She might have dozed a few minutes; but suddenly she woke up and saw a boat passing across the long line of light across the river. It looked black against the silvery moonlight. There were two men standing up in it, and their dusky forms swayed to and fro in a fierce struggle. Carola sat still and looked on, as she had often gazed as a spectator on a street fight. The boat crossed the light and drifted on into the darkness, but having once seen it she could still see it, though indistinctly. In a minute or two one of the black figures disappeared, whether into the boat or the water she could not tell. Only one man stood there where two had been a moment before; but no shout or cry broke the stillness of the night. The man who was left took up an oar and paddled back up the river, passing her so closely and so slowly that she could see plainly who it was.

"Why, that's George Bassett." she said to herself, drawing back a little into the deeper shadows of the thick timber. He had been haunting her footsteps of late, and she did not like him; she would not have him find her there for worlds. As soon as he was fairly past, she crept silently along the passage and into the open street.

Matthias Levi was looking out anxiously for her, and shook his head sadly at her uncertain and faltering gait. Carola had been away nearly an hour; and he did not know but that the old grandmother might be dead. Though it was not the Sabbath, he had put on his old prayer-robe, that he might recite his prayers, with a vague reverence for the approaching presence of the mysterious angel of death, who came alike to Jew and Gentile. He hurried the girl up-stairs, and stood at the foot of the ladder, watching her climb up it with her unsteady feet and trembling hands.

"Tell me how she is, Carol," he said eagerly; "you're yourself enough to know how the poor creature is? You're not too much overcome to see how she is, my dear?"

Carola turned round, and looked down upon him with streaming eyes.

"You think I'm drunk," she said, "and it's mis'rable I am. Why can't grandmother go on livin' as she's always done ? I've never done aught to vex her. I've kep' myself good because you and her was for ever and ever goin' on at me. I don't know any other girl as good as me. Haven't I always kep' myself a good girl?"

"Yes, yes, Carol," he answered soothingly; "and if you'd never take any drink you'd be a jewel. And you are a jewel to me, my dear. Only, you go on now, and tell me how your poor grandmother is."

On the low shelf which formed the chimney-piece of the garret a candle was burning in an old gin-bottle. It had burned dull during the girl's long absence, and cast a mere glimmer of light on the yellow and sunken face of the old woman. Her head was tossing to and fro on the hard pillow, and her ragged grey hair lay in thin and tangled knots about it. But her dim eyes glistened a little at the sight of Carola, and at the strong scent of the dram which she hastened to give to her, lifting up the grey head tenderly as she held the cracked cup to her lips. With a satisfied sigh, the dying woman fell back as soon as the dram was swallowed, and Carola sank down on the floor beside the bed, watching the parched and withered face as it seemed to grow darker and colder every instant, in spite of her faithful gaze.

"There's money for you, Carol," she said, speaking with great difficulty, and in a whisper; "plenty o' money, nigh upon a pound a week. You're a heiress. Matthias is takin' care of it; and I've been a good grandmother to you. The money's all safe, and I've never drunk more of it than I promised. I've never been bad to you, have I, Carol?"

"No, no," answered the girl, sobbing.

"And now you're nigh on eighteen, and you're a good girl yet," she gasped; "you've never stole or gone wrong; and I'm not afeard to give account to them as left you with me. There's not a many girls as don't go to the bad, and you're a pretty girl; but you promise me you never will, will you, Carol?"

"Never!" said Carola fervently.

There flashed across her mind the recollection of how George Bassett had kissed her in the Street a day or two ago, and how she had given him a fierce blow on the cheek, which had left the marks of all her fingers. She would do it again, and sharper, if there was any need!

Will God Almighty be very hard on me?" exclaimed the old woman with a sudden cry of terror. She started up in her bed, and glared with sunken and bloodshot eyes into the black shadows under a gable of the roof.

Carola looked that way with beating heart and shuddering frame; but there was nothing she could see. The crooked fingers that had gripped her hand slackened their hold, and the worn-out body of the dying woman fell back on the bed. When Carola withdrew her fascinated eyes from the blackness of the shadows, she saw that her grandmother was dead.

The next Monday all the neighbourhood was astonished at the magnificence of the funeral which went from Matthias Levi's house. The old woman had not been seen for years, and very few of her neighbours knew anything of her, except that Carola had a grandmother, on whose account she neither went into service nor into a factory. The hearse that carried the coffin to the distant cemetery was covered with handsome plumes, and the horses that drew it ad the mourning-coach that followed had the longest and blackest manes and tails which had ever been seen in that street. There was no one but Carola in the great coach, for Matthias had not deemed it right, as a Jew, to be present at the funeral of a Christian, and there was no woman among her numerous acquaintances whom the girl cared to ask to go with her. She had slept the last few nights on the floor of the garret where the silent and motionless corpse was, and many questions had thronged to her excited and quickened brain. They were in her mind still as she followed the coffin down the cemetery paths, and watched it lowered into the grave. The chaplain read the Burial Service decorously, but officially, and was turning away, when the loneliness of the weeping girl, and her pale and tear-stained face, struck him, and he turned back again, after going a few paces, to speak to her.

"Is there no one to go home with you?" he inquired.

"No; I'd nobody else but her," she answered, pointing down into the open grave; "and I don't know nothin' about where she's gone, or however I'm to find her again when I die. Isn't there nobody as knows?"

"You should go to your parish priest," he replied, "and he will tell you. What parish do you come from?"

"I don't know about parishes," she said; "but Matthias'll know, I dare say."

"I've a book here," said the chaplain, "that will teach you more than anything else, if you will read it carefully. You can read, I suppose?"

He took out of his pocket a small Testament, with well-worn binding, and. leaves that were somewhat thumb-marked. Carola held out her hand eagerly.

"Are you poor?" he asked again, glancing at her handsome dress, and thinking of the plumed hearse which had brought the coffin to the grave.

"Oh, no," she answered promptly; "I've plenty of money. I've no need to cry for that; but I want to know all I can about what has happened to her, for it'll happen to us all, you know. There was somethin' in her that went out all in a moment, like when a candle is blown out. One moment it's all light, and then it's all darkness. Where does the light go to?"

"I have not time to stay with you," said the chaplain, who had another funeral waiting for him, "but you must go to your parish priest and ask him. And you may take this little book with you. You may keep it," he added; "it cost only five pence."

Carola turned slowly away, but when the chaplain was out of sight she retraced her steps to the open grave. The hearse and the mourning-coach had left as soon as they had set down their burdens, and there was no one to speak to her, or to distract her thoughts from the solemn questions which were in her heart. The deep gloom of the little funeral, its sable plumes, and the unrelieved blackness of the hearse she had followed, had depressed her spirits. It was all new to her. There was no cemetery in the crowded part of the city where she lived, and this was the first time she had stood beside an open grave; she had. not even seen a place of graves before, and all about her stood the white tombstones of the dead in thick array. Folks died, and were carried away. in coffins; that she had known from her infancy. But death had never touched her strong young life before; it 'had never come' home to her. And now the poor old bed-ridden woman, who had been content to lie still all day, slowly consuming her daily allowance of gin, was gone into that dark and dreadful, mystery. Matthias had told her last night, with a face of awe, that he could not say what became of people that were not Jews, and neither her grandmother nor she were Jews. What was the terrible place whither she must go when her own hour came?

It seemed most strange to Carola that the street should look just the same as usual when she returned to it. Her old companions were lounging at their doors and the children were playing on the dusty pavement as if nothing had happened. Only they looked at her with something like unfriendliness in their aspect, and not one invited her into any of the spirit-vaults near at hand. The costliness of her mourning struck a kind of awe into their minds, and they felt that a dress so handsome ought not to come into contact with dirty floors. Matthias was at work at his stall, and he only gave a brief glance at her pale face and reddened eyes as she went softly and sadly past him up the spiral staircase. His heart was heavy for her; but what could he say? what comfort could there be in the death of an old drunken Christian like her grandmother?

Carola ascended to the empty garret, which had never been empty before. She threw herself down on the bed, and broke into a passion of tears and sobs. Matthias had taught her early that she must honour the old grandmother in the place of her father and mother, who were dead; and of late years there had been a kind of pitying affection in her heart for this poor, helpless, drink-besotted creature, who was the only person in the world belonging to her, and who was so utterly dependent upon her. How lonesome this garret was without her! Now and then there had been a gleam of love for her, and pride in her, breaking through the stupid lethargy of the old woman's torpid brain; and Carola could not bear to think that never more would she see those bleared eyes light up for a moment or two at the sight of her, or feel the withered hand touch her cheek caressingly. She had seen this rare and kindly light gleaming through the old grandmother's eyes only a few minutes before the change came, when the glimmering went out suddenly into utter darkness.

The twilight had deepened into night before Carola roused herself; and bethought her of the little book she had brought from the cemetery. She lit the candle, and set the bottle which held it upon the little round table, and drew up her chair beside it. Matthias was still at work, and she could hear the tap of the hammer in the shop, for his door and her window were open. The street was noisy with the usual clamour, and on the river there was still the sound of belated steamers passing by to the City piers. She leaned her head upon her hands, and looked down with smarting eyelids on the little page before her.

Carola's lips moved inaudibly as she whispered each word to herself,"The Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter I. The genealogy of Christ from Abraham to Joseph. 18 He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary when she was espoused to Joseph. 19 The angel satisfieth the mis-deeming thoughts of Joseph, and interpreteth the names of Christ."

Carola could read well, but it was hard work to get through the long genealogy, and it conveyed little meaning to her. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob she had heard of, and David the king, and Solomon, and the carrying away into Babylon, or possibly she might never have gone beyond the first two or three verses. But the name of Jesus Christ was quite new to her; that was a name which Matthias could never have uttered. She knew nothing of Joseph and Mary; but the thought of an angel coming to Joseph in a dream was very pleasant to her. Perhaps an angel might come and tell her what she wanted to know. The second chapter promised to be still more interesting, as she again read the heading: "The wise men out of the East are directed to Christ by a star. 11 They worship Him, and offer their presents. 14 Joseph fleeth into Egypt with Jesus and His mother. 16 Herod slayeth the children: 20 himself dieth. 23 Christ is brought back again into Galilee to Nazareth."

The brawling in the street died away into deep stillness, and the tapping of Matthias's hammer ceased; and out on the river the vessels lay at anchor for the night; but still Carola's pale young face and reddened eyes bent over the little book, and her brown finger went from line to line, and her lips moved with the words she was reading, long after all these sounds were gone. She mis-called many of the words; yet the charm of the story held her as no story had ever yet done. Her bright intelligence pictured all she read. She could see the star shining, and the wise men looking up at it, and following as it went before them. She saw them entering the house and falling down on their knees before the young child and His mother; they were like Matthias with his Sabbath prayer-robe on, not like the men who were only English and not Jews. And the children being slain, and Rachel weeping, how plainly she could picture it! John the Baptist was a real man to her, almost as real as Matthias. But oh! how much there was she could not understand! Who could this Jesus be, whose birth was foretold to Joseph in a dream, and of whom the angels took such special care? The wise men called Him the King of the Jews; and a voice from heaven said, "This is My beloved Son." Matthias had never spoken of Him. And they had brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that bad the palsy; and He healed them all. No wonder that great multitudes followed Him; she could see closely packed crowds, like the crowds on Lord Mayor's Day, thronging through the streets. And now He is gone up on to a hill, and all the people are gathered thick about Him; and she herself is there in the front, and He opens His lips. What is He going to say?

What He said she could only partly understand, and she still needed some one to explain it to her. But after a while she came to a passage so plain that a child could see much of its meaning. "After this manner therefore pray ye," said Jesus Christ. "Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen."

Carola lifted up her bended head as she came to the word Amen. Oh! how far better this prayer was than the few Hebrew words without meaning which she had picked up from Matthias. She rose from her chair and went to the window, where she always stood to pray. She had forgotten her own sadness: her brain was too full of the new and strange things she had been reading. To-morrow she must learn every word of this beautiful prayer, which Jesus, the Son of God, had told her to say. The other prayers were good for the Jews, but Matthias himself had been doubtful if they would do her any good. But this prayer was in English, and must be meant for English people. She lifted up her eyes to the midnight sky, and said softly, "Our Father which art in heaven." It was all she could remember: but the tears sprang to her eyes with the warmth with which she said them, though they were no longer sorrowful tears. There was something so sweet and strange to her in those words, that she kept whispering them to herself after she lay down on the bed, until sleep came to her excited yet weary brain.

The next day Carola pored over her new book with the ardent intensity of an unoccupied yet intelligent mind. There was no dull familiarity, to make the marvellous story slip by unheeded or be read half-heartedly. She did not throw the incidents into a far-off past of many centuries, through which the book had gathered rust or mould. They were as fresh to her as this day's newspaper. She had not even an idea that Jesus, the Son of God, whose star was seen in the East when He was born, and who had done so many and mighty works, and said so many wise words, was dead. All the narrative was so life-like to her that she could hardly stay to read more before starting off in search of this Son of God. The crucifixion came upon her as an utterly unexpected and terrible grief. It stunned and bewildered her. There had been so much triumph and gladness in her heart as she read of Him working miracles and being transfigured before Peter, and James, and John, and entering into Jerusalem with the crowds shouting Hosanna, that, like the disciples themselves, she could not believe that He would really suffer His enemies to put Him to death. She read the words as if in a dream, and turned back to the beginning of the chapter with a wretched feeling of mingled dread and unbelief, and looked at the heading of it again. "1 Christ is delivered bound to Pilate. 3 Judas hangeth himself. 19 Pilate, admonished by his wife, 24 washeth his hands: 26 and looseth Barabbas. 29 Christ is crowned with thorns, 34 crucified, 40 reviled, 50 dieth, and is buried: 66 His sepulchre is sealed, and watched."

With an exceeding bitter cry, which went to the heart of Matthias as he heard it in his room below, Carola threw herself on her knees beside the window, and hid her face in her hands. Oh! how she had loved this Jesus, from the time He was a little baby with the wise men worshipping Him, all through His life among men, healing them, and teaching them, and talking to them in parables; loving them and blessing little children; and now they had put Him to a cruel death, and all was over! How could such a thing be ? The light that was in Him had suddenly gone out, and darkness had. come again. And this was the most terrible darkness of all; for in all the men and women she knew there had only been a very common, very scanty light, which could be puffed out like the flame of a little candle in a rough wind. But she had not thought that the light of life in Him could ever be extinguished in death.

The girl was faint and weary with borrow when she took up the Testament again, after an hour or two of bitter mourning had passed by she wanted to know what His mother and His disciples did when their Jesus was laid in a tomb with a great stone rolled over it. They had seen Him crowned with thorns, and crucified with wicked thieves, and heard the chief priests mocking Him; ah ! that was a thousand times worse than dying quietly at home on His own bed. She turned languidly to the nest chapter, and read how Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the sepulchre, just as she would go some day soon to visit the grave where her poor old grandmother lay buried. Then with a beating heart Carola seemed to feel the earthquake, and see the angel of the Lord coming down from heaven and rolling back the stone from the door of the tomb; and she knew, before reading farther, as if something in her own heart told her that Jesus, the Son of God, lay no longer in that stony sepulchre. The heavy load of sorrow which had weighed her down was suddenly rolled away, as the stone was rolled away by the angel. It was all plain before her, the open, empty grave, and the mighty angel saying, "He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay."

Never had Carola gladness like that gladness. She felt the great joy of the women who had gone to the sepulchre, without their fear. Like all unlearned people, she thought in pictures, not in words. Her imagination was not dulled by familiarity with what she read. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was a man dwelling in a London house, walking about London streets, sitting in a boat on the Thames, and standing amidst a crowd of the London poor and sick. When at last she lay down to rest, a confusion of strange fancies passed through her wakeful brain; and as she fell asleep a face came to her in her dreams such as she had never looked upon before, full of majesty and tenderness, with eyes that seemed to pierce to her very heart --- eyes clearer than the morning star, which she had sometimes looked at wonderingly. A crown of thorns was about the head, but the face was smiling upon her, and all about it was a light --- far brighter it shone to her in her dream than the light of the noon-day sun. And she said to herself, "It is the Lord!"

For three or four days Carola did not leave the garret; the wonderful book held her captive. Matthias, with mingled anxiety and relief, saw her staying in-doors at last; only, in fact, staying too closely in-doors. He bought dainty morsels from the street stalls for her, such as be thought the girl would like, and brought them to the foot of the ladder for her to come down and fetch them. She did not appear to be crying much, but she was very quiet. In truth, Carola was living in a new world, among quite new friends, and she hardly thought of Matthias, except unconsciously to make the old Jew a type of these men she was reading about. Very soon she found that the wondrous history which she had read first in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, was told again three times, in a different way, and with fresh circumstances in each story. She read them through eagerly, and went on through the Acts of the Apostles; but the Epistles baffled her. They were all words here, and no pictures. So she returned to the Gospels, and read them again, and yet again. St. Mark, with its swift and vivid lire, and slight realistic touches, pleased her most. It did not seem as if she could ever grow weary of reading the Gospels. But by-and-by it dawned upon her how much there was she did not understand; and as soon as this ignorance made itself felt, it filled her with anxiety and an overwhelming desire to know all she could about her Lord. For

He was her Lord. He had not lived and died for the Jews alone, but for everybody who believed in Him. Though He was a Jew, He had come into the world to save the world.

"You ought to go to your parish priest," the chaplain at the cemetery had said to her; he who had given her the book. This she would do at once; and in eager haste she dressed herself in the handsome mourning she had not worn since the day of the funeral. She descended the ladder into the room, where Matthias was ceremoniously washing his hands up to the elbow, before sitting down to the frugal supper. Her face was pale, but her dark eyes shone with suppressed excitement.

"I'm goin' out to find my parish priest," she said earnestly; "do you know where he lives, Matthias?"

"Priest! priest!" repeated the old man, in a bewildered tone; "there are no priests now there are no sacrifices; We call them Rabbis now."

"Yes, I know," she said, nodding her head emphatically "Rabbi! Rabboni! Mary called Him Rabboni when she met Him in the garden, and thought it was the gardener. Oh! if I'd only been there with Mary Magdalene! But of course I cannot find Him, because He was taken up to heaven, and a cloud hid Him out of their sight. I want to learn all about it, Matthias; I want to be a scholar. There's such a many things I want to know; and I can't live up there any longer, knowin' nothin'. And the gentleman that buried my poor grandmother, and wore a long white gown, told me I ought to go to my parish priest. It's him I want to find."

"I'm sure I don't know where you'll find him," said Matthias.

He looked fondly from under his shaggy eyebrows at Carola's eager and pretty face, but he did not comprehend much of what she said. Mary Magdalene was a totally new name to him, and a parish priest he had never heard of. If she had asked him where she could find a clergyman, his fears would have been aroused; and if she had pronounced the name of Christ, it would have been a sword piercing through his very soul. But Carola, in her new-born love and reverence, could not call her Saviour by name in the hearing of Matthias as yet. He knew there had once lived an accursed impostor, who called himself the Son of David, and claimed to be the Messiah, and who was said to be their god by the wretched thieves and drunkards and blasphemers among whom he had his dwelling. These people, who made night and day hideous with their crime and misery; were the only Christians he was acquainted with. He was kindly in his feelings towards them, and patient in his manner, pitying them, as some gentle and passive English Christian might pity and tolerate the degraded masses of some heathen population among whom he was compelled to dwell and gain his livelihood.

The one object of his life had been to keep Carola free from the false religion of these vile and miserable Christians. The idea had very early suggested itself to him, whilst she was a mere infant, that if he could get her to keep the Ten Commandments, and never join in Christian worship, the God of his fathers might accept the service, as being all that could be expected from the child of Christian parents, and would grant to her such favour in the world to come as the Jewish women might be reckoned worthy to receive. What that was he did not know, but be would do what he could to secure it for Carola. He could not make her a true Jewess --- that was impossible; but he would guard her from becoming a Christian; and he might find a Jewish husband for her. Carola's children should be Sons of Abraham. The unbroken seclusion and isolation in which the old grandmother lived had aided hint. No Christian teacher or minister had come into contact with the girl until the day she bad gone alone to lay her only relative in a Christian grave.

Carola did not tarry for any longer conversation with the old Jew, but passed swiftly on down the spiral staircase, and out through the shop-door. It was like leaving some quiet and peaceful sanctuary for the lonely garret had been full of holy companionship to her these days past --- and plunging into a wild world of debased and wretched life. The summer evening was close and thunderous, and the narrow streets were crowded with people driven out of doors by the heat. The heavy atmosphere was laden with foul and sickening smells, in spite of the nearness of the river, or partly, it may be, in consequence of it. Children were crying, women quarrelling, and men swearing. Carola felt a strange sense of repugnance, almost amounting to terror, as she passed through the familiar scene. It was as if she had been away into the kingdom of heaven, and had been thrust back to hell.

There were numbers of people anxious to speak to her, for she had been missing ever since the day of the funeral. There were young men, too, who had been watching for her to appear again, to exchange with her more of their low, rough jokes and their half-savage attentions. But what change had come over Carola? Her pretty face was pale and grave, and her feet went swiftly on their way, as if she was deaf and blind to her old acquaintances. Was this the romping, hoydenish hussy whose tongue had been so sharp, and whose spirit had been so bold among them as long as they could recollect? If George Bassett was here, he would not let himself be kept at arms' length as they were.

Carola sped on as if she was passing through fire. She looked neither to the right hand nor to the left, for there was no one here who could help her to find the parish priest, or would if they could. But presently she came upon streets where she was not known. An elderly policeman was sauntering along on his beat, and she ventured to ask him.

"Parish priest!" he repeated; "perhaps it's the Rector of St. Chad's you mean. You go down yonder street, round the corner, till you come to a big church. The house lies just behind it, in a corner of the old churchyard."

It was with a trembling hand that Carola lifted the great knocker on the Rectory door, and let it fall with a single yet loud rap that made her heart leap. It was answered instantly, and she entered a large square hail, with benches set on two sides of it, on which some women were seated, waiting for their turn to see the busy Rector. She watched them go into an inner room, and come out one after another, until she herself was called in.

The Rector was an elderly man, with a worn and overworked look, but his eyes met Carola's gaze with an expression of very benevolent interest, which deepened somewhat as he saw how young and eager was the face of the new-comer. She had lost her tremulousness in her earnestness, and she did not wait for him to speak to her first.

"Are you my parish priest," she asked, "as I ought to come to?"

"What parish are you in?" he inquired, with a kindly smile, full of encouragement to the eager girl.

"Oh!" she cried, with clasped hands, "I don't know nothin' about parishes; and I don't hardly know nothin' about a priest. There were wicked priests as had my Lord crucified; but you couldn't ha' been one of them, I'm sure. P'raps you knew some of them, though, and I want to know all about it. I want to go to a good school and learn everythin'. S'pose you aren't my parish priest, you could tell me to a good school."

"Where do you live, my girl?" he asked. There's sure to be a school near your home."

"Oh! I must get away, right away," she said, almost sobbing with eagerness. "I couldn't live there any longer, now I know what my Lord was like. He wouldn't like me to stay there. I want to learn about Him and the disciples, and Mary Magdalene, and all the men and women as went about with Him. There's such a many things I can't understand, and nobody to tell me. And I wish to do everythin' exactly as He wants me, so as to be ready when He comes back again. Oh! I shouldn't like to miss doin' anythin' He wanted done."

"Little by little Carola, standing before him, with her grave young face growing brighter as the Rector listened so attentively, told her story to him, and showed him the wonderful book which had held her captive ever since her grandmother's funeral. The Testament was so old a book to him that he merely glanced at it in her outstretched hand; and with almost a shock of disappointment she put it back into her pocket.

"Do you mean that you never heard of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ before this?" he asked.

"Never!" she replied.

"Nor of God Almighty?" he continued.

"Oh, yes!" she said; "but He is the Lord God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob; and this is my Lord. I've kept all the Ten Commandments ever since I can remember; but I was as mis'rable as the rest of them almost; and that made me take to drinkin".

"But now I can't live any longer among folks as drink, and swear, and steal. I want to get away as far as ever I can, and live with folks like John, and Peter, and Mary, and Martha, and all of them. I don't mind what place it is, so that the folks are like them in my book."

"That would be a place hard to find," said the Rector to himself.

At length he sent Carola away with a promise that he would come himself the next day, and see how true her account of herself was, and speak to Matthias Levi of her desire to go away somewhere into the country.

"It was quite dark when she reached home again, and the streets were a little clearer. But she rushed into the little shop where Matthias was watching for her on the door-sill as if it had been a city of refuge; so fearful was she of being caught and held by one or other of her former comrades. The face on which the light of his lamp shone was radiant with hope, and a gentle smile of inward delight lit up the swarthy features of the old Jew as he followed her up the narrow spiral staircase into his living-room.

"I've found him!" she cried, standing with her foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, and pausing before she went up into her garret.

"I've found my parish priest, and he's a good man, and he'll come and see you tomorrow. He's goin' to find a place in the country for me, where I can learn everythin', and where the folks are good and don't drink or swear, or do anythin' bad."

"That 'ud be a good thing, Carol," said Matthias.

"But his heart felt very heavy, as he brooded over the news when Carola was gone. To lose her would be like losing sunshine and eyesight both. It was all the joy he had in life to see her coming and going through his rooms, and to listen eagerly to every word she spoke whenever she chose to stay with him a few minutes. But he had of late been very chary of making any claim upon her time or affection, lest she should grow to hate the wrinkled old man who tried to exercise any authority over her. The girls of her class would not brook any restraint, and he had left her as free as the air; but he was bound to her. Every word she spoke to him, and every sign of love or trust she showed, was a priceless treasure to him.

He awaited with deep anxiety the arrival of Carola's parish priest. The title had conveyed but little meaning to him; but as soon as he saw the Rector of St. Chad's he knew at once that he was one of the hated ministers of the despised Christian race among whom he dwelt. He felt towards him as much repugnance, mingled with dread, as some mild Christian trader might feel towards a heathen magician, who wished to take from him one of his dearest possessions.

"You are a Jew, I believe," said the Rector courteously, standing just within the door of the little shop, in which there was but bare standing-room.

"Yes," replied Matthias from his cobbler's bench, "I'm a Jew."

"And a young Christian girl is dwelling here under your roof," he went on, "and, I presume, under your guardianship. Is she any relation of yours?"

"No," he answered. "I'd give all I have in the world to make her one of our people, but she isn't. She's the grand-daughter of a man who once did me a great service, and his wife and Carol have lived in my attic for many a long year. Carol was born there, and she's never lived anywhere else. I suppose as she isn't a Jew, she'd be called a Christian. All the folks about here are Christians."

"He glanced out into the Street with a look of contemptuous pity; and the Rector sighed deeply as he also looked at the open vice and misery that were but too plainly to be seen.

"Yes, the girl ought to get away from here," he said, "and I have thought of a school in the country that would exactly suit her case. It will be far away from her old haunts and companions. I understand she has some money that would meet the expense, or partly meet it?"

"Who says she has any money?" asked Matthias. "We're poor folks! just look round you, sir. Do we look like rich folks?'

"It was the girl herself who told me so," he answered. "She says her grandmother told her on her death-bed that there was nearly a pound a week for her, and that you took care of it, and would pay it to her."

"Has she anything to prove it?" inquired Matthias, casting down his eyes, for he felt as if the cunning of this question bordered on dishonesty and falsehood.

"Not that I know of," answered the Rector, who, in fact, had been very doubtful of the truth of Carola's statement.

"She has only the word of an old woman who drank all day long, and wasn't in her right senses," pursued Matthias. "She can't go to that school if she has no money, I suppose?"

"No," said the Rector; "but I might get her a place as a servant."

"How much money would it take?" he asked.

"At least 40l a year," was the answer; "for it would not do for the girl to have any holidays and come back here. She would be quite unfitted for living here again."

"She would never come back," said Matthias, almost with a groan. "She'd never live here again, and I should see her no more, no more for ever!"

"There was a profound sadness in the old man's tone and manner; but the Rector was thinking too exclusively of Carola to notice him. Though, if he had noticed him, he was so much accustomed to think of all Jews as cunning and avaricious, that the sadness would only have aroused his suspicion that there was some money in the question.

"I must think it over," said Matthias finally, "and I'll send Carol to you when I've decided what I'll do."

It was a troubled day and a sleepless night that the old Jew passed through after the Rector's visit. Carola's fate seemed left in his hands. It was true that he had charge of about 1,500l which Carola's grandfather had entrusted to him, and which was invested in the Consols under his name. The old man had scraped together this little fortune as a marine store-keeper, but upon his death-bed was so fearful of leaving such a sum to his wife or son, who were both confirmed drunkards, that be resolved to give it over to Matthias during his own life-time to be invested in Consols. Matthias Levi was well known to him, and was under some obligation to him, and so firm was his trust in the Jew's fidelity that he had placed the whole sum in his hands, and made him trustee of it as long as his wife lived. The trust had been faithfully discharged throughout the lifetime of Carola's grandmother, who was the only person acquainted with the circumstances. There was no bond or paper of any kind in existence; and the secret was now entirely in his own keeping.

All day long and through the night Matthias turned the question over and over in his bewildered and sorrowful mind. If the old grandmother had but lived a few years longer, till be had found a Jew to marry Carola! But now, should he let her go, she would certainly become one of the despised and doomed Christians, losing thereby her dubious chance of being regarded worthy of the future fate of a Jewish woman. Might she not have gone whither Sarah, and Rebecca, and Rachel had gone? For Carola had never been baptized; but if she went among Christians they would baptize her, and she would be lost to him for ever I That was the sting of it. To be lost for ever! In this world and the next ! All the bonds of morality taught in the Ten Commandments would be loosened in her, for were not the besetting sins of the Christians drunkenness, and blasphemy, and theft, and vice such as made him shudder as he fancied Carola being plunged into it? No, he could not let her go among the Christians.

But then there came the conviction that he could not keep Carola if she chose to go. She had already outgrown her childhood; nay, many of her street companions had lost their girlhood, and had entered upon a hard and wretched womanhood. The strong, free spirit of the girl would not submit to his control. She would leave him if her mind was bent upon it, and go away into this terrible world of Christians penniless and friendless if he did not remain her friend. That would be too dreadful.

And if he took advantage of his secret, and withheld from her the money that was rightly her own, how could he himself lift up his head before the Judge by whom actions are weighed? There was a passage in the Hebrew Bible, heard many long years ago, but as keenly in his memory as if he had listened to them only a few hours ago---"What does God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" He had loved mercy, and walked humbly with his God; and, now the temptation had come to do unjustly, was he to yield to it? Would it be doing justly to keep this money from Carol, even for a time?

When he had put up the heavy bar on his shop-door at night, as carefully as if he dwelt in some country where Jewish homes are assaulted and sacked by the mob, he went to his old desk, and from a secret drawer took out a worn and yellow paper, that was all he possessed to represent the sum of money invested in the Consols. There was no name on it but his own. He was a poor man; his love of mercy had stood in the way of his enriching himself. But these hundreds were indisputably his; no person in the whole world could question his claim to them. He did not really covet them. If Carola had remained with him, he would have rejoiced that they were hers. But they would separate her from him altogether. To go to that school would unfit her for this place, so the Christian priest confessed. But if she went sway penniless, as a servant, why, then his old house would be the home to which she would turn in any hour of difficulty or distress. Moreover, she would discover how cruel Christians were to friendless and penniless folks; and she would perhaps come back altogether, glad to find a refuge in the dwelling of one of God's own people. This last thought was one that sorely tempted him, and would not be driven away from his troubled mind.

He could not bring himself to speak to Carola till late the next day. It was the beginning of the Sabbath, which, now the summer was come, began at a late hour; and Carola came down out of her garret to light his lamp and prepare his evening meal. She was too careful to wear her heavy black dress in the house, and she was dressed in the shabby patched gown which had been her best before her grandmother died. Her face was pale and wistful, but there was a tranquillity and sweetness, a look of happiness in it such as he had never seen there before. He watched her in silence as she went softly about his room, his whole heart yearning in unspeakable tenderness towards her. He felt almost as if she was dead, and he was mourning that he had not done all he could to make her life with him happier.

"Carol", he said, in a tremulous voice, "do you want to go away and leave me?"

"Oh, it's not that!" she answered gently, with tears in her eyes, "but I want to learn all I can about my Lord. You know all about your Lord God, and you say your prayers to Him, and keep His Sabbath and His laws; and I want to do the same, and learn what my Lord would have me do."

"Who is your Lord?" he asked in a voice more tremulous than before.

"The Lord Jesus Christ", she answered in a low yet joyous tone.

The blow fell heavily. Already, then, she had been drawn away and enticed into the fatal worship of the impostor! All his hopes withered, as if a hot east wind from the desert had suddenly beaten upon them, and scorched them. He closed his eyes, and saw his beloved one whirled away from him in a raging torrent of sin and misery. He had done his utmost to save her, and all had been in vain. An unutterable anguish took possession of the old man's soul, and he hid his face in his hands and groaned aloud; then he felt Carols hand laid tenderly on his shoulder, and heard Carol's voice speaking softly in his ear.

"Oh, and He was a Jew like you!" she said, "only He was the Son of God --- your God! and He came to save us all, not the Jews only. And the priests had Him crucified; and He was buried and came to life again, and went up to heaven. I have read it all in a book. You never knew it, or you'd have told me, I know. For you thought your God didn't care for folks that were only English, and not Jews. But my book says God loved the world, and sent His Son to save all the world. I'll run and fetch the book, and read it to you; for it's all in English, only I can't understand it all."

If any one had been pronouncing his sentence of death, Matthias could not have shuddered more to hear it than he shuddered at hearing these words from Carola's lips. The blasphemy of them pierced through to his inmost soul. He lifted himself up from the seat into which he had fallen, and there was the terrible calm of despair in his face and voice as he looked steadily at her.

"He is the accursed one!" he cried loudly and sternly.

For a minute Carola gazed at the old Jew with an expression of amazement, which gradually changed into terror. It flashed across her mind that this was how many of the Jews had spoken of the Lord whilst He was among them. 'He hath a devil, and is mad,' they said. And Matthias was on their side. Matthias would have been among those who cried out, 'Crucify Him! crucify Him!' There was an extreme bitterness in the thought. A torrent of tears came to her eyes, and she turned swiftly away to hide herself from this enemy of her Lord, lest he should curse Him again.

"Oh, I love Him who died for us!" she cried as she left Matthias standing motionless, as if he had been turned into stone. "I love Him so as I could die for Him!"

There was no longer any question about the money with Matthias. Carola was already a Christian, and nothing he could do could save her from her doom. He told her the next day, without remonstrance or reproach, that she might go to the Rector of St. Chad's, and tell him he would allow her 45l a year till she was twenty-one, and then the money which stood in his name in the Consols should be transferred to her.

Before the next Sabbath came Carola was gone, and he was alone.

Carola's new life was exactly the reverse of the old. At a boarding-school in the outskirts of a small country town, among girls who were the daughters of tradesmen and of small farmers, all the circumstances of daily life were utterly different. A fine network of rules and customs such as she had never dreamed of encompassed her. The Rector of St. Chad's, who had sent her there, had deemed it best not to say much of her former position, and had warned her not to talk of it herself. The school was well chosen; a good homely place, where a plain and solid education was given, with no ludicrous attempts at gentility. Carola was not to waste time in acquiring a smattering of any accomplishment; but her voice was to be trained for singing, and she sang well.

She had never seen the interior of a church in London, and when she entered the long aisle of the parish church, with its arched roof resting upon polished columns, and saw the tinted light that shone through the painted windows, and heard the deep and solemn tone of the organ, her heart beat last with delight.

"Why is it so beautiful?" she asked; "is it because they love Him so? That makes me very glad."

But it was the same when she saw a little chapel standing alone amid the fields. It was not so grand and beautiful a place as the church, but if they who built it built it for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, that too made her happy, and it was a pleasant place to enter.

By-and-by she began to understand many things about the life of Christ that she could not have learned for herself, and she could place the incidents of that life into more harmonious order; but, there remained a freshness and power in it which those around her, too long accustomed to read it with wandering minds, did not share with her. Shades of doctrine, which her teachers saw only too keenly, were altogether imperceptible to her. She wished to obey the precepts of Christianity with a literalness and simplicity which perplexed and embarrassed them; and there was a strange directness and fervour about her love to Christ, which set her, as it seemed, almost at variance with those about her.

It is true that something of this freshness and vigour of feeling wore away as years passed by, and the story of Christ's life grew more familiar to her. But still she had made the discovery of Him for herself; and there was too deep a fund of joyousness in that discovery to allow her to fall into the listlessness of so many Christians. The sun had so shone in upon her darkness that she could never more love darkness rather than light.

As time went on, Carola scarcely cast a glance backward. She was of a nature that lived intently in the present, and this was so full of new interests and occupations that she seemed to have no time to recall the past. Moreover, there was nothing to link her with it. Matthias reckoned her as dead to him, and held no communication with her. He punctually paid the interest of her money to the Rector of St. Chad's, exacting a receipt from the ladies who kept the school where Carola was; for he had no faith in a Christian, and especially in a Christian clergyman. But no message from him reached the girl; and though now and then, as she read in the Testament how the Jews denied their Lord, and persecuted Him, and at last crucified Him, a sad memory of Matthias, who would have done the same, crossed her mind, she willingly banished it, lest any feeling of personal hatred should mingle with her indignant borrow at their crimes.

As for Matthias, his heart seemed to be dead within him; though he still sat at his cobbler's stall, and many a barefoot Christian child went away shod from his shop-door, with no more money dropped into his till. It was almost mechanically that he continued to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with his God; there was no more a happy consciousness in him that he was doing so. Day after day he saw the never-ending flood of wretchedness and crime from which he had done his best to save Carola, as though he stood upon the brink of a darksome pit, and knew that she was lost there, though out of sight. Her garret was empty, for he would never let it to a stranger; and the Christian woman whom he was compelled to have to wait on him on the Sabbath kept it clean and habitable, but he could not bring his mind to enter it. Sometimes during the long and dreary Sabbath hours he fancied he could hear the old grandmother and Carola talking overhead. But it was only a dream; and when he roused himself, how silent and empty was all his life!

A stealthy feeling of triumph moved his cold heart when he heard of the death of the Rector who had stolen Carola away from him. Not that he expected to find her again; he did not even hope for it. She had become a Christian in spite of his precautions, and was lost to him. But his foe was dead, and could exult over him no longer. When Carola was twenty-one, he transferred the money in the Consols to her name, and felt as if the last interest that tied him to earth was gone.

A few days after old Matthias Levi had transferred her little fortune to Carola she entered upon a new life. The post of village schoolmistress was offered to her through her governesses, and she accepted it gladly. It was a small endowed school, founded by a certain Lady Hazelmount, more than a hundred years ago, with a salary of 50l. a year and a cottage and garden attached to the schoolhouse rent-free. The Rector of St. Chad's had, before his death, recommended her to the office when it should next be vacant, and the vacancy occurred just as Carola was twenty-one.

She awoke with the earliest gleam of dawn on the morning after the long journey that had carried her down to Hazelmount. There was at first no sound to be heard save the rustling of the ivy-leaves round her open window, a sound more soothing than is dead silence; and she might have fallen asleep again but for the sudden crowing of a cock, which seemed to awaken a hundred chirping little birds under the eaves of the thatched roof. Very soft and sleepy the twittering was at first, but as the light grew stronger all the many cries and notes of country life resounded through her quiet chamber, and Carola made haste to dress herself and see what her new home was like.

A short flight of stairs led her down into a large old-fashioned kitchen, with a low ceiling, crossed by massive oak beams. A broad deep window of lattice-panes stretched across the one side of the kitchen, and on the window-sill stood a blue jug filled with tall white lilies, which just caught the first rays of the rising sun. The quarried floor was of dark red, and the oak chairs and table, and the long dresser near the window, were almost black with age. An eight-day clock, a hundred years old, was ticking softly in a corner. The tender sunlight was flickering here. and there through the quivering ivy-leaves, and filling the pleasant room with a cool and subtle cheerfulness. Carola looked round with a smile of utter contentment. She had never seen a place like this before; never before had she felt as if she had a home. She breathed a deep sigh of satisfaction though the tears started to her eyes --- "Jesus Christ and His mother could have lived here", she said to herself.

The thought made it seem a holy place, without taking away from its homeliness. Yes, Mary might have,sat there, in the tall old arm-chair in the chimney-corner; and the Lord, weary and wayworn as He often was, could have rested on the oaken settee, with its high back, which screened the chimney-corner from the door. Oh! if she could but have ministered to Him as the women did! If she could but have washed His feet, arid wiped them with her hair, and kissed them with many kisses! Or, if He would have asked her, as He asked the woman of Samaria, to bring Him water to drink! She had never seen a place before where she could fancy Him living at home as He might have done here, in this spotlessly clean and solemn yet cheerful room. The thought of it made her wondrously happy as she crossed the quarried floor with quiet steps and threw open the latticed casement.

"How lovely it is!" she breathed, half aloud.

The cottage stood on the slope of a hill, and, as far as her eager eyes could reach, there stretched a vast plain of meadows and corn-fields, losing themselves in a hazy distance, yet with faint forms lying across the dim horizon, which might be either low soft clouds or far-off mountains. Near at hand the hedgerows were full of fine oak and elm trees, still in full leaf, but with shining gossamer webs woven round them. The sun was touching all the landscape with its earliest and tenderest rays, and low-lying beds of mist, brooding over the hollows, gleamed of silver in the light. A narrow lane ran past her cottage, and on the other side of it was a corn-field, with the corn gathered into brown shocks, which cast long shadows across the yellow ground; whilst the restless leaves of a row of aspen-trees glistened and danced in the morning breeze. As she leaned through the window, scarcely breathing for very gladness, a lark began to sing so suddenly as almost to startle her with the flutter of sweet song that fell upon her ear. Carola listened as if she bad never heard a bird sing before.

"Yes, certainly He might have lived here", she thought; "and yonder is the corn-field where He walked with the disciples on the Sabbath day. And it is my own house", she added, as she turned away from the open window.

Home was a thought entirely new to her. She had been happy at school, working hard to gain the knowledge she longed for; but it bad been too full of little rules and regulations to possess the freedom of a home, and Carola had always loved freedom. It was very pleasant to her, lonely as she was, to set about her morning's work, kindling the fire, and hanging the kettle on to the chain and hook which fell from the chimney. The housewifely instinct stirred pleasantly within her. She had never tasted a meal so delicious as the breakfast she ate with her door open, and the little birds hopping fearlessly on to her door-sill to pick up the crumbs she scattered for them. How good it was to have a home, especially such a home as the Lord Himself might have lived in.

Her work as schoolmistress was not to begin till the harvest was over, but Carola found plenty to do, and the day passed quickly by. The corn-field before her house was a busy place, and now and then she paused to watch the waggons coming and going, and the band of harvest-men lading them, whilst little knots of women and children loitered round the gate and under the hedges. Towards evening, when half the field was cleared, they were allowed to enter and glean the stray stalks of corn, and Carola could no longer keep herself away from them. The thin film of school-girl shyness which had crept over her during the last three years was dispersed at once. Bare-headed, as she had used to run about the streets of London, she stepped out of her cottage, and crossed over into the crowded corn-field. The old impulse to be in the front of any gathering of her fellow-creatures was astir again.

it was a very busy hour, for the sun would be a long twilight under the harvest moon, night would come before the field was cleared. The village folk had little time for more than a word and a smile as their new schoolmistress passed to and fro, helping the feeblest and the youngest to make up their tiny shocks of corn. Babies, wrapped up in cloaks and shawls, were lying under the hedge, most of them sleeping, with their thumbs in their little mouths; but Carola came upon one that was fretting with low, languid wailing and sobs, unheard by its busy mother. she picked it up with a strange thrill of tenderness, for oh! how long it was since she held a baby in her arms! Soothing it very gently, she strayed on towards a closed gate, over which she could see the setting sun going down in a clear sky, with a soft green light lying all around it. Almost unconsciously to herself, Carola's sweet ringing voice was heard over the busy corn-field, singing as the lark she listened to in the morning had sung:-

The first two lines she sang alone, standing with the glow of the setting sun shining on her uplifted face; but then the familiar hymn was taken up by the deep voices of the men at the waggon, and the women who were gleaning lifted themselves up to join in it, and the children shouted it out with delight. A finely solemn feeling fell upon them all; it was almost like being in church, the women said to one another afterwards. When the hymn was ended, and the new schoolmistress came down the field again, still carrying the baby in her arms, she had won the hearts of all who were there.

Hazelmount was so small a village that the news of what the young schoolmistress was like, and how she had sung the Evening Hymn in the corn-field, spread throughout it that evening. The men who carried in the last load spoke of it to Mrs. Arnold, of the Grange, as they sat slowly eating their supper, which had been spread for them on a long table in the farm-yard under her own superintendence. She had been too much occupied all day to pay her intended visit to the new schoolmistress, whose cottage had been made ready for her by herself and her servants the day before. The coming of a schoolmistress was always a little event in Hazelmount; and what. the men said of her heightened Mrs. Arnold's curiosity. But her husband and her son would tell her more when they came in from the field.

They came in shortly after their harvesters. Both of them were tall, strong, handsome men, with a masterful air about each of them, as if there was no one with any right to dispute their authority. The son stooped down to kiss his mother, and she stroked his arm with her hands fondly.

"Well! and what is our Miss Fielding like?" she asked, somewhat eagerly; "and what is this I hear about you all singing 'Glory to Thee' together in the field?"

"She's as pretty a young maiden as any twenty miles round", answered her husband, "and she sang the hymn as naturally as a bird. She was singing to a baby she'd picked up under the hedge, and it sounded so hearty and so true we couldn't help joining in. It seemed just a right thing to do, and not a soul of us but was the better for it. We'll get her to sing for us at the Harvest Home."

"And what do you think of her, Philip?" asked Mrs. Arnold.

"Oh, she has a good voice", he answered carelessly.

But he did not tell his mother that he could still see Carola standing bare-headed, with her rapt face towards the setting sun, singing out of the pure gladness of her heart, and that the sweet, joyous tones of her voice were still ringing in his ears. She had not noticed him among his men; how should she, when he was working as hard as any, in a dress very little different? But he should not get the thought of her out of his head until he had seen her again.

The little hamlet of Hazelmount was not altogether a common country village. It lay at the gates of Hazelmount Park, and every cottage in it was built in a picturesque style, and surrounded by pretty gardens, that the eyes of the owners of the Park, or those of their numerous guests, should not fall upon anything to shock them. There was no public-house in it, and only one little shop, in a cottage down a by-lane. The parish church was a mile away, but there was a highly decorated private chapel at the Hall, the road to which ran through the Park and past the village school; with a chaplain's house half-way between the Hall and the school. Hazelmount was built at the end of a long inland cliff of red sandstone, with the fresh air of thousands of meadows blowing across it whichever way the wind blew. There was no town nearer to it than Market Upton, which was seven miles away, and which was itself only a small country town numbering fwe or six thousand inhabitants. No manufactories were within thirty or forty miles of it, and the nearest railway station was four miles away.

The Arnolds of the Grange had lived there from generation to generation. The Hall and the estate had passed away from the old family of the Hazelmounts, and had been bought by a rich manufacturer, whose widow, Mrs. Stewart, was still in possession of them. But the Arnolds, though tenant farmers only, held their old farm, with no fear of being disturbed, and inscribed their names in the parish register as their forefathers had done for hundreds of years backs It was the same with many of their labourers, whose names, usually attested by a cross, could be traced in the register of births, marriages, and deaths as far back as the name of the Arnolds. The labourers who tilled the fields and tended the cattle lived and died, like their masters, under the same old roof-tree beneath which they were born. The ancient half-timber farm-house, with its dependent cottages, was like a strong old oak, with its branches; and the human beings dwelling in them came and passed by as the leaves came and went in their seasons.

It might have seemed, but for the sweet winds blowing all about it, that the air of the little hamlet was heavy and tainted with the deaths of so many untold generations of men and women; and that the cottages, so often visited by the last enemy, would strike a chill like that of a tomb; but the dead were as much forgotten as last summer's leaves. The sun shone as merrily for those who were in the land of the living, and the corn grew as thickly in the furrows where so many departed forefathers had sown and reaped, and the thick trees sheltered the harvesters as kindly, and the earth and all that is therein was as fresh and fruitful and as joyous as it had ever been in earlier and younger times.

The very core and heart of the little hamlet was the Grange; and the rulers of all its concerns and affairs were the Arnolds. There was no other farm in it, and Mr. Arnold was looked upon as the best farmer for many miles round. He was the agent of Mrs. Stewart, who was generally absent from the Hall, where he was almost master. The great kitchen at the Grange, which was large enough to hold all the population of Hazelmount, was the common council-chamber and assembly-room of the village. Men and women and children brought their troubles and their wants there, sure of a patient audience from the master or the mistress. This was so natural a custom that the latter would have felt aggrieved if their humble neighbours and dependants had sought help and counsel elsewhere.

Mr. Arnold, like his fathers before him, was churchwarden; and neither he nor his wife nor son was ever absent from their great square pew next to the reading-desk in the parish church. They were men much in earnest about doing their duty both towards God and man, and they were held in high repute as men of honour and integrity. Mrs. Arnold went somewhat beyond this in her religion. Though she could not induce her husband to deviate from the customs of his forefathers, by having family prayer at any other time than Sunday night, she read some chapters in the Bible to herself morning and evening with scrupulous care; and as long as Philip was only a boy she had required him to read with her. She made a point of going through the Bible from beginning to end once a year; and she had accomplished this feat thirty times. When any of their cottagers were ill, she visited them daily, and read to them suitable and impressive passages of Scripture; sometimes with an inward thrill of emotion which made her feel that there was something more in the familiar words than she had yet laid hold of. It is natural to any community of human beings to seek a spiritual guide; and for many years Mrs. Arnold had been the spiritual guide at Hazelmount, as being the one among them who stood in the closest relationship to the unseen world.

No stranger had settled in Hazelmount for many years; in fact, there were no other dwellings than the cottages of the farm labourers, and a few of the workpeople belonging to the Hall gardens and the Park. The only persons from outside the old timeworn circle of village life were the mistresses of Lady Hazelmount's school, who came and went away again after a longer or shorter sojourn in the place. They had been a class of well-conducted common-place young women, who felt themselves above the cottagers, and were looked down upon as social inferiors by the families of well-to-do farmers in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Arnold, in the absence of any lady at the Hall, stood in the place of a patroness to them. She was invariably kind, and supplied them with frequent welcome presents of farm-house produce, which materially added to their salary; and Mr. Arnold was liberal in his presents to them; but there had been no attempt on either side at intimate social intercourse. The schoolmistresses had found the place too dull and lonely for them, and they had seldom stayed longer than one twelvemonth.

Early in the afternoon of Carola's second day in Hazelmount, Mrs. Arnold went down to the school-house. The school itself was a large and lofty room built with thick stone walls, and with a window of stained glass in the high-pitched gable; but the old-fashioned cottage beside it was half of timber, with a thatched roof overrun with ivy. The door ~vas open, and as Mrs. Arnold walked slowly up the narrow garden path she could see Carola sitting in the pleasant kitchen, so lost in the reading of a book that she had time to notice the new schoolmistress well before she was seen herself. It was a sweet young face, she thought --- a pretty face, prettier than any she knew for miles round, as her husband had said. There was a subtle feeling of discomfort and dissatisfaction in her mind. Mrs. Stewart had engaged this Miss Fielding at a distance, and sent her down to Hazelmount without asking her opinion. It was true she had excellent testimonials; one especially from an old friend of Mrs. Stewart, a clergyman in London, who had died. recently; but still Mrs. Arnold wished, almost unconsciously, that she was of more mature age, or possessed as few personal attractions as her predecessors.

But there was not much time for these reflections, for at the first sound her footsteps made as she approached the open door Carola lifted up her head and hastened to meet her, with a warm flush and a smile of welcome on her face. She clasped Mrs. Arnold's outstretched hand in both of her own, and gave her a half-shy kiss, then drew back a little and looked into her face with tears sparkling in her eyes.

"Oh! I know who you are!" she cried; "you are Mrs. Arnold, and everybody says how good you are; and if you had not come to see me soon, I should have come to you. You were kind to me before you knew me, for it was you who made this place so beautiful for me. Almost all the pretty things in my new house came from you. And oh! how beautiful it is here, wherever I go. I have never had a home before. If there is ever anything I can do for you, how glad I shall be!"

Carola spoke rapidly and eagerly, though in a low and half-timid voice, and she looked entreatingly into Mrs. Arnold's face, as if anxious to win her favour. Mrs. Arnold was almost ashamed that she could not give the impulsive girl a warmer welcome; but the secret dissatisfaction she felt made her manner colder than was usual.

"You can teach the children well", she said in her quietest tones; "that will repay me."

"But that, of course, I shall do for my Lord's sake", answered Carola, "because that is what He has sent me here to do. If He had asked me what I would choose, and if I had considered it for years, I could not have thought of any place more beautiful than this, or any work better than teaching little children. It is so good of Him to send me here!"

There was no doubting the sincerity and simplicity of the fervent voice and earnest face, and Mrs. Arnold felt that the young schoolmistress was saying exactly what she thought.

"I can talk to you about our Lord Jesus Christ", she went on, "for everybody says how good you are, and how it is you who teach them about God. I shall do all I canto work for my Lord; but some day there may be something I can do for you, and then I shall feel as if I belonged to you. I have no friend in the world belonging to me, and I want to find a home and friends here. Will you not care for me, and love me a little --- by-and-by, perhaps?"

"My dear child", answered Mrs. Arnold, "of course I will care for you."

"Then I shall be perfectly happy", said Carola, "And ever since I knew about Jesus Christ I have not had a day's trouble; not one day's real trouble. That is three years ago. And now He has sent me to this place, where there seems to be no hard trouble for anybody. Life is very easy here, and very pleasant. You all know one another like brothers and sisters, and nobody is hungry, or ragged, or drunken, or miserable."

For in Carola's memory there was a black background, towards which she seldom gave a glance, but which was there nevertheless, and gave all the more glow and light to this new life of hers. It was like the dark and heavy background of some old picture, which serves only to throw into relief the loveliness of some face looking out of the dingy canvas at us; if the face was gone, who would throw away a glance at the obscure painting? Carola sighed softly as she spoke of being drunken and miserable.

"But we all have our crosses and our trials", said Mrs. Arnold.

"Oh! these are nothing", cried Carola; "they can be nothing to people who know about Jesus Christ --- to those who know that when He went away He sent them another comforter to abide with them for ever. It is people who don't know that have hard troubles, too hard to bear. There is nobody to make us afraid here; there is nothing to make us forget God. It is almost like the Garden of Eden when the Lord God walked in it in the cool of the day."

"Yes; and the tempter was there", said Mrs. Arnold gravely; "and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. it is the same thing here. You will soon find the tempter at work, and man trying to hide himself from God. We all do at times, my dear."

"Are you sure I shall do it some time?" asked Carola. "I don't know much yet, and I've only known about Jesus Christ for three years; but I've never wished that He could not see me. Oh, I could not bear to think that!"

"You know very little of real life", answered Mrs. Arnold. "You are young, and you fancy these feelings will last for ever; but they will die away in time. Your mind will get full of other things."

She was about to say that when Carola married her household cares would engross more of her time and thoughts; but she checked herself; she would put no notions about love and marriage into the girl's head.

"Oh, I cannot bear to think it!" Carola exclaimed; "it would be like losing everything again. It would be worse than not knowing it, to forget it. To think that my Lord should have lived in this world, and died on Calvary; and me to forget it! No, no; that is impossible! I cannot forget it, because the Spirit is to teach me all things, and to bring all things to my remembrance, whatsoever He said to us. How could I forget when God's own Spirit, is reminding me of what my Lord has done? I wish sometimes He would set me something hard to do; something painful; something like the crown of thorns, and the cross. If I could do anything painful to myself, it would make me more like Him."

"The time will come", said Mrs. Arnold.

There was a faint stirring of trouble in Mrs. Arnold's heart as she went homewards Carola was altogether so unlike the other schoolmistresses who had been before her that she could not dismiss the thought of her. There was a charm about her fresh young enthusiasm and her vividness of speech which she could not resist. The girl did not speak of her Lord as of one who had died long ago, and gone back to the heaven from whence He came, but as of one whom she knew personally, and whose footsteps she was really following. And she took it for granted that she as a Christian felt the same. There had been something very spirit-stirring in her eager tone and words; and Mrs. Arnold's heart warmed towards her at the recollection of them.

But if there was a charm for her in the girl's pretty face, and sweet voice, and fresh enthusiasm, what might there not be for Philip? He was her only child, and the deepest desire of her heart was to see him well and happily married. No girl came into the circle of their acquaintance without being closely observed, and there was scarcely any end to the qualifications necessary in Philip's wife. It was simply impossible that he should marry a village schoolmistress.

The secluded little village, usually jealous and curious enough of any stranger, accepted Carola without a question. She had been chosen by Mrs. Steward to be the schoolmistress, and that was sufficient guarantee of her suitability. But before long it came out that she possessed a fortune of her own, and her claim upon their respect was doubled. They had never had a governess before with an independent income; and no better proof was needed that this girl, who had no home or friends, came of a good parentage. Mr. Arnold, who, as agent, had many chances of investing money profitably, proposed to her to put out the money at a higher interest.

"But I don't want more money," she said simply. "I have more than I can spend now. There is nobody poor here, for they have all enough to eat and to wear. I could not spend it if I had it."

"You may want more money by-and-by," said Philip Arnold, with a light on his face as he looked at her. "Couldn't you spend more upon yourself? Are there no trinkets or fine clothes such as girls like that you could spend money on?"

"I don't think I could," she answered smilingly. "How should I look with fine clothes on in my schoolroom or my kitchen? Besides, I don't care to be higher in the world than Mary was, my Lord's mother. She was poor, you know, but not very poor. I think she might have lived in a house like mine; and I should choose to live as she lived as near as an English woman can. And there were Mary and Martha, who prepared the supper for our Lord and served Him at the table, and Peter's wife's mother, who ministered to Him herself. I think l must be more like them than if I were richer, and I'm glad to have it so."

"Then you have no ambition," said Philip; "you don't want to rise in the world?"

"How could I?" she asked. "Didn't our Lord say, 'Whosover of you will be chiefest shall be servant of all?' Oh, you don't know; I am more than content to be as I am!"

For a moment a shade passed over Carola's face. She felt they did not understand her, though they regarded her with such friendly eyes. To care little for money, to have no wish to rise in the world: that was a childish view to take of the Christian religion. It was all very well for this young girl, who knew nothing of real life, and fancied she could live as the birds live, secure in the care of that God by whom the sparrows were not forgotten; but such a view of religion was impracticable for men of business, whose forefathers had been thrifty farmers, and had left them money, which must be made into more money. They were doing it honourably, and no man could reproach them with doing a shabby thing, not even the small meannesses that many other Christian men of business permitted themselves.

The time passed by very happily for Carola. When the harvest was over, the nutting and the black berrying began; and she wandered along the lanes, that were filled with autumn scents, treading on a carpet of moist brown leaves, whilst the band of merry children, delighted to have their new schoolmistress as a companion, dragged down the bramble-bushes and the tall hazel shoots, and brought to her the finest of the fruit. When the winter came, she would often make her way across the fresh furrows where the corn was newly sown, to visit the boys who were scaring away the hunger-stricken birds, lest they should feel lonely at their work from dawn to dusk, short as the days were growing.

So busy she kept herself that there was not an idle moment in her day. Before long her pleasant kitchen became the favourite resort of the villagers --- a common meeting-place such as they had not had before. For there was no public-house in the hamlet, and the master's large kitchen at the Grange was something of an audience-chamber. But in Carola's cottage there was always a cheerful fire burning, and there was a warm welcome to whomsoever knocked at her door. She was glad to see them, and they felt it. Sometimes there was singing, if those who came could sing, and sometimes she had a book to read in her dear, natural voice, which all could understand She could cut out clothing, and turn old things into new; and if one could only find her alone, how full of sympathy she was when all their thoughts and troubles were falteringly told! The schoolmistress's house became a rival of the farmhouse, and Mrs. Arnold, when she drew aside the thick curtains of her sitting-room window, could see the lattice casement all alight, and knew that some of the people, who in former days brought their troubles to her, had carried them to their new friend.

"It is pretty to hear her talk o' Jesus Christ," said one of the old women to her; "she do talk of Him as if she'd known Him. It's like hearin' o' somebody that lives close by. And everything make her think of Him, the hens scrattlin' on the ground, and the flowers in the gardens, and the great white clouds, ay, and the sparrows fightin' under the eaves. I niver thought as He'd lived just like us."

"Yes, she's full of fancies," said Mrs. Arnold ungraciously. For it was a hard thing to see those who had once looked up to herself for spiritual guidance and consolation flocking around this young girl, and repeating her words one to the other as if there was some special sacredness in them. There was a change in the village. It had not been an ideal village in former times, though no great crime or vice was likely to happen in it. There had always been village squabbles and jealousies; the men had got drunk occasionally, though it was more than a mile to the nearest public-house, and the women had been idle and thriftless, spending their time in unfriendly gossiping. Mrs. Arnold had seldom been asked to teach any but the sick and dying, for religion had seemed a thing fit chiefly for those who were about to quit this familiar life. But now it was becoming the subject of every-day talk, and the wonderful life of Christ was being thought about and pondered over in quite a new manner. The old family Bibles, which had lain dusty and unopened on the shelves or the window-sill in the cottages, were being read, sometimes by the children who went to school, but quite as often by their parents. They were beginning to realise that the Lord had been a working man as poor as themselves, and that the Testament was a book for working people. A new and keen interest was awakened in them.

"It was a new thing, that would not last very long," thought Mrs. Arnold. Was it a comfort to her to think so? She did not dare to ask herself the question. But it was a comfort to find Miss Fielding so busy and so absorbed in her work as to be unable to give any special attention to her son Philip. There was not a trace in her manner of seeking admiration; she was as simple and frank in her tone to him as she was to Jack Windy-bank, the waggoner. But though Philip spoke of her as indifferently as he had been used to speak of the schoolmistresses, he spent an hour or two now and then in her cottage of an evening when there was some singing going on. Even Mr. Arnold would turn in, and linger there, finding it a pleasant change from the monotony of his own fireside.

"What is it you see in that girl?" Mrs. Arnold asked one evening, when her husband came in with a bright look of pleasure on his face, after leaving her alone till supper time was come.

"Well, she's pretty and kindly," he answered, "and full of life. It's pleasant to see a young creature as full of life and energy as that. She's a little hasty in her temper, but then she's quick to be sorry for it. She keeps them all alive in her kitchen, I can tell you. Ah! Mary, my dear, if we'd only had a girl of our own like her!"

"I think all men are foolish," she replied sharply. She had been about to say fools, but checked herself, for that was too harsh and petulant. "I suppose," she added in a lower tone, "you would not like Philip to make her your daughter?"

"No, no; that would never do," he answered, "Oh! that would never do. She's a good girl, and pretty, but she's not Philip's equal. Philip must look higher than that, very much higher. If I saw anything of that sort going on, I should put a stop to it."

A year passed by, with all the changes of the seasons, and Carola had not been absent for a night from her new home. It had grown dearer to her every day, the first spot on earth that had been dear to her. It was known by all about her that she was an orphan, and had no friends, having come direct from school to take her present post; but she had not spoken of her past life, and no one had felt curiosity enough to ask her any questions. As for herself, the past had been cast so completely behind her that she had well-nigh forgotten it. Her life was too full, and her interest in the present too deep and absorbing, to allow her to look back into a past that was utterly set aloof from her.

The harvest was gathered in again, and the busiest season of the farmer's year was over. Great ricks stood in the stack-yard, which lay immediately behind Carola's cottage --- near enough to allow Philip Arnold to hear her voice singing or to catch sight of her figure flitting past the window as he loitered along the narrow paths running between the ricks, keeping out of her sight and his mother's. His love for her had been growing slowly and secretly, though he could see no one hopeful point in it. There was no assurance in his heart that she cared for him; at times he even told himself that her mind was too full of other things to give him a thought. It was a wayward fate that had sent her to Hazelmount, for if he had never seen her he might have married well and prosperously in his own station. He did his best to conquer this perverse and secret love.

For if he spoke to her of it it might drive her from the quiet home where she was so happy. It would make him unutterably miserable to bring trouble upon her. Even if she cared for him, trouble must come of it, for his father and mother would never give their consent to his marrying beneath him.

Beneath him! The young man's heart rose in revolt. It was he who was beneath her. There was nothing be could offer her which she would care to accept. What were riches, and lands, and store of this world's goods to her, who cared not at all to be richer than her Lord was ? Poverty had greater attractions for her than wealth. If she did not care for him personally, there was nothing belonging to him to tempt her.

He could have wished himself a poor man for Carola's sake, almost; but he had been brought up to think much of his position and the money that was accumulating for him. Re knew how many thousands were profitably invested as his future inheritance; for his father liked to talk of the different investments he made, priding himself upon his shrewdness and knowledge of the money market. It was a very subtle worship of mammon that had taken possession of them both. But Carola's vivid and picturesque convictions of what Christ's disciples must be was piercing through the thick scales that encrusted his conscience. Only a little while ago, when he heard her speaking familiarly, as she always spoke of people in the New. Testament, of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus, asking what was lacking in him to inherit eternal life. Philip Arnold had confessed in his heart that he, too, would have turned and gone away very sorrowful, but unwilling to sell all and follow Christ. Yet he could almost wish himself a poor man to win Carola's love.

It was early in November, and the yellow leaves were falling fast and thick from the trees at every gust of wind, when Philip rode down the lane past the school-house one morning. There was a meeting of the hounds on the other side of the Park, and a day's hunting was before him; though the busy and monotonous hum of a steam threshing-machine sounded from the stack-yard. His father, who had long since given up hunting, would look to the day's work. Philip had seen his mother watch him out of sight, with an expression of fond pride on her grave face; and surely Carola could not but look at him favourably to-day. He saw her afar off, leaning against the gate through which he must pass, and watching a group of merry children at play. At the sound of his horse's feet she looked round, and made haste to open the gate for him, holding it open, with a smile upon her face. How pretty she looked in the soft sunlight! Though she would have held the gate open, and looked as pretty, if Jack Windybank had been riding through on one of the waggon-horses. That was the vexation of it. But as he drew nearer he saw the smile fading away into a wistfulness that was almost sadness. Was it possible she was afraid of some accident befalling him in the hunting-field ? He had heard other girls express such fears when they had been visiting at the Grange; how pleasant it would be to hear them from Carola's lips!

"What is the matter?" he asked, taking off his hat, and bending down to her; "what are you thinking of?"

Carola cast down her eyes, and a slight flush suffused her face, but she looked up again frankly and answered him unhesitatingly.

"I was trying to think," she said, "if our Lord was holding this gate open for you to pass through, what He would think about what you are going to do. You know He and His disciples were working men, and they had not time to go out for pleasure. But they would think about it, of course. Would He be grieved as you passed by ? There is nothing about it in the Testament, I know; and I am only a girl, and very likely to make mistakes. But it will be on my mind all day."

"But you would take all pleasure out of Life," he said, almost angrily.

"Should I?" she asked wistfully. "I should riot like to do that, for I am so happy myself. And I hope you will enjoy it, and have a very pleasant day," she added, looking at him again with a bright flush and smile.

But how could he enjoy the day with her words ringing incessantly in his ears, and her sweet and serious face haunting him ? It was in vain to tell himself it was only a girl's fad, the notion of one who led a very narrow life, and saw everything from a fanatical standpoint. It was a manly sport. His mother was one of the best women living, and she never said a word against it. What ailed him that the words of an ignorant girl, who had never been away from school, should spoil his enjoyment?

He was fifteen miles away from home when the day's run was over, and his horse was too fagged to carry him back. He put him up into a stable, and waited for a train that would take him to the station nearest to Hazelmount. He had four hours to make away with at the inn where he dined; they were slow and dreary hours to him. He could not but feel that if he took Christianity simply and literally, as Carola seemed to think it necessary to take it, his existence would be all changed to him. How many trivial things, making up a large sum of daily life, would become impossible to him! Really to do what the teachings of Christ demanded, to become the salt of the earth, to be the light of the world, whether he ate or drank, or whatsoever he did, to do all to the glory of God; why, what an astonishing, what a terrifying change it would require in him! He fancied he could hear Carola's clear unfaltering voice saying, "One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and take up the cross and follow Christ." His spirit died within him at the thought of such a claim and such a sacrifice. "One thing thou lackest! one thing thou lackest!" rang through and through his brain.

He was glad to leave the train and start on his midnight walk homeward. It had been uncertain whether he would return that night, and no one would be sitting up for him, but the key, of the kitchen-door would be left for him with Jack Windybank, who slept in a loft over the stables. He was in no hurry to reach home, and he loitered along under the dark sky, with the hedgerows on either side of him as black as ebony. All the desolate country was as silent as if every creature was dead. Part of his way lay across a heath, all the little by-paths of which were as familiar to him as his old fold-yard, but to-night his feet stumbled among the tufts of heather sail he was walking on strange land. His thoughts were so busy be could pay no heed to his footsteps.

He was still more than a mile from home, and the long inland crag lay dark against the sky in front of him, when suddenly a fine thin tongue of flame darted into the air, flickered for a moment, and then, died out. His eye caught it instantly on the horizon, and he stood still for a minute gazing at the point where it had flashed and vanished. But now a second flame, and a third, leaped upward against the blackness of the night, and with the quick promptings of terror he hurried on swiftly, There was a small thick coppice to pass in the Park, and he tore his way through the underwood which hid the fire from his view; but, coming out upon the road along which he had ridden in the morning, he saw the gate Carola had held open for him, and behind it Carola's cottage forming a background of leaping flames.

How far off it seemed as he sped along, and how silent and still the night was I There was no stir of any one coming to her help. The whole village would be asleep at this time, and the school-house, standing alone at the end of a lane, might burn to the ground before any one knew of it. He remembered that the steam-engine had been at work all day, and no doubt a spark from it had fallen somewhere on the damp thatch and smouldered there. All the stack-yard was in danger, and so scarce was water on the brow of this hill, nothing could be done but stand by and see it burn. But Philip was thinking only of Carola. Could he get to her in time? What hindered him that he ran so slowly?

When he reached the porch all the roof was alight, --- the roof underneath which she was sleeping. The door was fast, so she could not have made her escape; but it resisted all his efforts to burst it open. He had uttered no shout whilst he had been speeding to her help, and he could not spare breath now. It was too late for any one to help but himself. If he could not save her in a minute or two, there would be no hope for her.

He ran round to the school-house door and flung his whole weight upon it; it gave way before him, but the dense smoke that filled the place almost suffocated him. He groped his way through the thick folds to the inner room and reached the foot of the little staircase. The current of air from the open doors fanned the smouldering thatch at the head of it, and there lay Carola insensible at his feet.

To catch her up in his arms and make his way back to the open air was the work of an instant; and scarcely had he carried her out of the deadly peril before he heard the shouts of people waking up to the discovery of the fire. All the village seemed running to them; but his strength was gone, and now that she was safe he felt himself trembling in every limb. Yet he held her fast in his arms till his father, who was the first to reach them, could take Carola from him. "Take care of her, father," he said, gasping for breath; "she is dearer to me than my life."

"It is of no use fighting against fate," thought Mrs. Arnold, as she received Carola, cold and shivering, from her husband's arms. There could be no more sleep that night for any one in the farm-house, for the stack-yard must he closely watched, and every hand be ready, lest a fire should break out anywhere. The pits were full of water, but they lay at the bottom of the hill, and the machinery for pumping it up was slow and heavy. There was no chance of saving the school-house, but fortunately the wind blew away from the stack-yard, and the firebrands of burning thatch fell harmlessly into the fallow fields on the other side of the cottage. Nothing was left of Carola's first home but the thick stone walls.

"I would rather it had been anybody else," said Mrs. Arnold, when Philip and her husband were lingering over their early breakfast, after all danger was over.

"No, my dear, no," answered Mr. Arnold; "there's not a girl that would make us a better daughter. And if our boy here loves her better than his life, don't let us spoil the matter for him. I never thought to say I'd take a schoolmistress for my daughter-in-law; but I've watched her closely, and they'll be happy together, as happy as you and me."

"But perhaps she will not have me," said Philip, with an anxious glance at his mother's clouded face.

"No danger!" she said fretfully; "if she was a girl I should choose for you, your equal, Philip, perhaps I should think her a little indifferent in her manner. But she will jump at you; oh, yes! a girl in her position, after saving her from such a horrible death too!"

But Philip Arnold soon discovered that he could base no claim to Carola's affection on having rescued her from death. It was evident she did not hold her life very dear to her; there was in her something of that contempt of death which made the early followers of Christ meet martyrdom joyously. Probably she had never heard any speculations about the hereafter, and had no idea except that which Paul had, that "to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord." She listened to Philip's account of how he had forced open the door and found her lying insensible at the foot of the staircase, with wonder at the strong emotion the recollection of it produced in him, for his voice faltered and his hands shook as he spoke of it.

"It would have been such a terrible death," he said, shuddering and drawing nearer to her.

"I did not think of that," she answered; "it would have seemed terrible to you, but oh, how much I should have known by this time! Perhaps the first thing I should have seen would have been the face of my Lord. I suppose I must have been very near dying, but I did not know it at the time, for when I awoke, almost suffocated, I crept downstairs at once to find the door. But if you had not found me I wonder where I should have been now?"

"Are you sorry, then?" he asked.

"Oh, not I" she cried, holding out her hand to him. "I am glad you saved me; I am thankful, very thankful to you. Of course, if God wishes me to be here, I am glad to be here, but I am not afraid of going away, you know. You need not have been very-grieved if you had not been in time to save me."

But the thought that he might have been too late to save her almost unmanned him. He left her abruptly, and went away down to the ruined cottage, wondering what would have become of him this day if he had been only a few minutes later in reaching it a few hours ago. One necessary result from the conflagration was, however, full of pleasure to him: Carola must find a home under their roof until the place could be rebuilt. The schoolroom, which was built altogether of stone, with a roof of red tile, had not been destroyed by the fire, and might in a few weeks be ready for occupation again, but the half-timber cottage could not be rebuilt till the spring came. Until then Carola must live at the Grange, and if he could not win, her by that time there would be no hope left in him of ever doing so.

It was an unutterable delight to Philip to see her going to and fro about the house, taking her full share of the household cares, and busying herself in the. winter work of the farm. For Carola could not hold herself aloof from the life around her, and this new chapter of farm-house doings was crowded with interest to her. December is always full of work, and the days are short; and Mrs. Arnold had often sighed for a daughter who would take some of the burden of house cares off her shoulders. There could hardly be a better daughter than Carola; and Mrs. Arnold half-grudgingly admitted it. Nor could she detect in her any lurking coquetry of manner with regard to Philip. If she had been a girl whom she wished to see his wife, her fears would have turned in the direction that she was indifferent to him.

The days and weeks passed by quickly for Carola, who, to her own wonder, felt herself as much at home in the great rooms at the Grange as she had been in her little cottage. There was not, perhaps, the same freedom; but there was an atmosphere of love and care surrounding her which she had never felt before. She could not help seeing that Philip's face brightened at the mere sight of her, and that Mr. Arnold looked at her with tenderness. As she had lost all her little possessions by the fire, except an old brown Testament, which she had caught up hastily as she made her way through the smoke, he never returned from market without bringing her some article which he fancied she might want, and which he gave to her with a fatherly delight. It was a new thing to Carola to find herself the object of so much thought and affection.

Life here, at the Grange, was not quite as narrow as at the school-house. There were visitors coming and going, whose conversation was of other things than the simple talk of the cottagers with whom she had chiefly associated. An election for the county was going on, and many political questions were discussed among the farmers who came up to the Grange to hear Mr. Arnold's opinions. The newspapers that arrived daily were full of interest to her, bringing intelligence as they did from all quarters of the world. She began to realise how large the world was; and how vast its concerns. The little narrow sphere of thought in which she had been moving was extending in all directions; and she stood looking out at the dim and limitless expanse with wondering eyes.

The school-house was ready by Christmas, and school was to begin again as soon as the new year came; though the blackened walls of the cottage still stood bare under the grey skies. On Christmas Eve Carola went down to look at some decorations the village children had put up, and when they were gone she entered the little ruin, which looked, as desolate as a greater one could have done. The roof was gone, and the clouds driven by the wintry wind swept over the open space, whilst the keen air blew in through the broken casements. She stood sadly on the blackened hearth, with the charred fragments of the thick oaken beams overhead fallen about her. The old oak chair in the chimney corner and the settle opposite it were destroyed, and all the small household treasures were gone. They might be replaced, but her first home could never be the same again. It was only a little ruin, and no great calamity had befallen any one; but in her heart there was a vague; and indefinable sadness. This would be her home again no more.

She was shivering as much from sadness as from cold when she turned back into the schoolroom, where a large fire was burning in the wide grate, filling the dusky room with flickering light. But the room was no longer empty as she had left it, for Philip was standing on the hearth. The thick wall had been between them, but he had been standing opposite to her, and facing her, in the warmth and light of the fire, whilst she had been lingering on the desolate hearth on the other side.

"I came down to see if there was anything you wanted," he said, as she came towards him.

"No," she answered softly, "I only want my little home again, just as it was before; and that can never be. It can never be the same again."

"Nothing is ever the same again," he said. "Do you think if you had died that night life would ever have been the same again to me? Listen to me for one minute. I know I'm not as good as you, but I love you. I've had a happy life, God knows; but to-morrow will be the happiest day in it, if you'll promise me-to be my wife. Only promise."

He looked across the hearth at her with an eager face, but he did not take a step nearer to her, so fearful he was of startling her; and she stood motionless, gazing at him with a look of wonder. She had never thought of such a thing as this; but the surprise had a strange sweetness in it. It was almost as if some young prince had come wooing her. All the people about her looked up to him and his father as their natural rulers and masters. How could it be that he should come and ask her, the village schoolmistress, to be his wife? A crimson flush suffused her face, which had been pale and sad a minute ago, at the thought of Philip Arnold coming to her as a lover; and a minute's silence passed by before either of them moved or spoke again.

"Can you say nothing to me?" he asked at length.

"I don't know what to say," she answered, almost in a whisper; "I never thought of it before. Is it true?"

"It's as true as that I'm alive," he said vehemently; "it's true that I never loved any girl before, and it's true that I've loved you from the first moment I saw you. I cannot keep it in any longer. Promise me that you'll try to love me."

"But I never thought of it before," she repeated in a tone of wonder.

"You're not slow in thinking," he answered, "and you know all about me. Surely, here in Hazelmount you know all that people think of me. There is nothing to be found out. I've lived here all my life; and you yourself have known me many onths. Oh! be quick in thinking. I only want you to promise to try to love me."

"Oh!" she said, speaking very low, "there isn't any need to try. How could I help loving you, if you love me?"

It was so marvellous a thing to her! She could not see anything in herself that he should love her. Why should he pass by all the accomplished young ladies who so often visited at the Grange, and fix his love on one who knew so little, and could do so few things? As he clasped her closely to him, she looked up almost anxiously into his face.

"Are you quite sure I shall suit you?" she asked; "I can do nothing but sing; and oh, your mother would like you to have so much more!"

"Well I" he said exultingly, "I'd rather have your singing than the best music in the world. And I'd rather have you at my side, keeping me right, and making me a truer Christian, than have the cleverest girl in the country. My mother will love you with all her heart when you're my wife; ay, and my father too. I have never forgotten the first moment I saw you, my darling."

They walked back to the Grange slowly, hand-in-hand. The cottage doors were closed as they passed by, but every window was lit up, and they knew well who were gathered round the fire in each little homestead. A strangely sweet and solemn feeling was in Carola's heart. She had loved these people, and served them faithfully; and now they were to be her own people all her life long. Her place was here, in Hazelmount, not an uncertain place as schoolmistress, but a settled habitation as Philip Arnold's wife, the mistress of the little village. The old many-gabled farm-house, the windows shining out into the dark night with the blazing fires and the lighted lamps within, put on quite a new aspect to her. This was her home --- the roof under which she and Philip were to live and die together.

Carola could not sleep that night for pure gladness. There was no restlessness of mind or body, and she lay as still, with her eyes closed, as if she was sleeping like a happy child. But no unconsciousness enfolded her. A solemn sense that all happiness must come from God, and must be in harmony with His will; or it could be no happiness for her, was impressed upon her; and a ceaseless prayer was in her inmost heart. "Thy will be done!" was the cry of her spirit; but without dread, and with no fears for the future, and no anticipations of trouble. Hitherto the will of God had filled her with inward blessing and tranquillity, with no sorrow added. The narrow path had been for her a path of peace.

It was Christmas Day, her Lord's birthday; and until this year it had been filled from morning to night with thoughts of Him. But there was naturally a distraction to-day. She had been very much alone in other years, either at school or in her own quiet cottage. This morning she walked down to the parish church, with Philip at her side, and she sat in the pew beside him, and sang with him out of the same hymn-book. It was Philip's way of announcing that a change had taken place in their relationship to one another. He had not spoken of their engagement yet to either his father or mother; but they knew only too well what he meant, and Mrs. Arnold wept some bitter tears as she knelt down during the long Litany.

Others besides Mrs. Arnold understood the exultant expression on Philip's face. The Hazelmount cottagers gossiped about it on their way home along the frosty lanes. It had been suspected for a long time that Mr. Philip was in love with the young schoolmistress; and some were of opinion that he was about to marry beneath him, when he might have had other girls with thousands of pounds for their fortune. But the majority, in consideration that Carola, too, was not altogether without fortune, looked favourably on the little romance being played out before their eyes, and said to one another it was wiser to marry for love than to marry for money. At any rate, it was plain Mr. Philip was going to have his own way now, as he had done all his life long.

"Come with me round the fields, Carola," said Philip, as soon as their early dinner was over. All the farm servants who could be spared were going to spend the rest of their Christmas Day at home; and there were the sheep and cattle to be looked at in distant fields. It was a very pleasant thing to do, thought Carola. The low December sun was going down, a hazy ball of red, in the grey sky, and a white rime, here and there tinged with rose-colour, lay on all the ground, and changed the bare hedges into white coral. The furrowed ground was frozen hard; the great meadows stretched before them, spangled with frost, and the old corn stubble in the unploughed fields crackled under their feet. The pale grey-blue sky shone with delicate clearness behind the line of Scotch firs, which stood in array along the brow of the hill; and as they looked down upon the village they saw the blue wood-smoke rising from every cottage chimney and melting softly away into the moist air. Philip's forefathers had tilled every field and trodden every path they walked along; the hedgerows had been planted by them, the seed been sown and the harvest gathered for hundreds of seasons. All the true wealth and blessedness of these old familiar fields were his: and as Carola walked beside him his heart was full to overflowing. Had his father and mother known such happiness as this when they were young, and all the long years lay before them? It was like singing an old song that had been the joy of many generations. There had never been such a Christmas Day for him, as well as for her. All the world seemed full of their gladness.

The sun had sunk behind a bank of dun coloured clouds, and the moon was rising over the fir-trees, before they returned into the fold-yard and went in at the kitchen door. Mr. Arnold was sitting in the chimney-corner smoking a long clay pipe, and he made room for Carola to sit down beside him, putting his arm round her shoulders, and stroking her cheek fondly with his rough hand. Jack Windybank was seated at the end of a long bench, cutting with a clasp-knife at a huge piece of pork-pie, and speaking slowly with his mouth full.

"Phil," said Mr. Arnold, in a tone of unusual animation, "you recollect poor Lumley, of Market Upton?"

"Him as was robbed and drowned four years ago," interrupted Jack Windybank; "that's him, sir. They've took up the man as was suspected. He's bin out o' the country ever since; but he were seen one o' these last days, and the p'lice hadn't forgot him. I s'pose the reward 'ill hold good yet: a hundred pounds it was. I wouldn't ha' minded catchin' him myself."

"Poor fellow!" said Philip; "he went to school with me, Carol, and turned out badly; and his relatives sent him up to London, with money to take him out to New Zealand and buy a little land there. But nothing more was heard of him till the police found his body in the river, with marks of violence on it enough to cause his death."

The glow upon Carola's face died away, and the smiling light in her dark eyes grew dim. It seemed to her that once before in some former life she had heard these words spoken, and had shrunk from hearing what was about to follow, as if it would blight and crush her whole being. Her breath came and went fitfully, but she kept silence; not a word escaped her trembling lips.

"Why! what a nervous little creature it is!" said Mr. Arnold tenderly; "that's the shock from the fire. You've no courage to hear of bad things or sad things, my Christmas Carol. Come, come!"

"He do say he can prove he were an alibi," continued Jack Windybank; "he were with his sweetheart that night, if she could be found. But girls like them are always shiftin' about, and never livin' in one place. But the man's name is George Bassett, and I were wonderin' if he belonged to the Bassetts o' Market Upton anyhow. They were a bad lot, them Bassetts; and young Lumley might ha' known them, and fell in his way very likely."

But Carola heard nothing except the name George Bassett. The blow stunned and benumbed her brain, and for the moment she could think of nothing and realise nothing.

"George Bassett! George Bassett!" she repeated again and again to herself; but the name did not seem to mean anything yet. Her face was tranquil, and she looked steadily across at the weather-beaten face of the old waggoner. Her pulse beat no faster or slower. She felt almost as if she was going to sleep, and perhaps the long walk in the frosty air had made her drowsy. Mechanically she untied her bonnet-strings, and rose up from the seat by the fire.

"I will come down by-and-by," she said to Philip, with a little smile and nod; "I'm tired just now."

The moon was shining in at her bed-room window, giving as much light as she needed for what she had to do. For what could she do? She crouched down on the floor and laid her arms on the low window-sill, to wait until this unnatural calm and stupor should pass away and the tempest break in upon her soul. She looked out, with eyes as steady and heedful as if she had nothing else to think of, on the wintry landscape flooded with the light of the full moon. The great far-off plain was lost in the blackness of the night, but near at hand every cottage window twinkled with light, and the dark outlines of their lowly roofs showed clearly against the sky. Yonder lay the fields, dim and shadowy now, where but an hour ago she was walking hand clasped in hand with Philip; and across the eastern sky stretched the jagged line of fir-trees over which they had watched the moon rise. The Christmas chimes from the church tower in the invisible plain below came softly and merrily up to her listening ear. She could catch also through the still and frosty air the shrill voices of children singing the carols she had taught them from door to door. Almost without knowing it, she herself chanted in an undertone the anthem they had sung in church at the morning service: "Glory to God in the highest: And on earth peace; good will towards men!"

Then suddenly, with a heart-shaking swiftness, she saw the narrow dirty street where she had spent her girlhood, with its knots of demoralised men and women and its swarms of miserable children. There was herself passing in and out among them, going with them into the gaudy gin-palaces, and reeling back again in their company. She could hear them talk, and every nerve tingled with shame. Their homes were open to her; not homes but styes, unclean and squalid. George Bassett was beside her; his arm had caught her round the neck, and she was fighting to free herself, amid the jeers and laughter of her companions. It seemed like hell to her; and she had dwelt there once. She had grown up in it.

Carola writhed at the recollection, and the sorest anguish of repugnance took possession of her soul. Oh, the unutterable shame of it! She had cast all this former life from her as a loathsome garment, and it had seemed as if she might rid herself of it altogether. It had scarcely ever laid the slightest touch upon her memory until now. But now she was forced to look back upon the hole of the pit from which she was digged, the polluted place from which her life had sprung.

She hid her face even from the pale moon light. It was as if the years that had passed over her since she was that ignorant and shameful creature were blotted out, and she was again, at this moment, what she had been then. And yet there was an awful feeling of those happy years haunting her. She had been born again; she had been a new creature; she had been a child of the light, and. had been walking in the light. But night has come again with a thick darkness of degradation.

Yet why could she not keep her secret, and bury this dead past in the depths of her own heart? Why should she sacrifice the fair and sweet and peaceful life that was before her? No one knew anything about it; these new friends, so dear to her, had no suspicion of it. Matthias Levi, her old friend, had no clue to her present home, and he had made no effort to find her. There was nothing to link her with that disgraceful time. Why should she not let the dead past bury its dead, and herself act in the living present only? Must she thrust a sharp poignard into the heart of this peaceful and happy and useful life?

She tried to imagine herself hushing the persistent outcries of her awakened memory, and becoming Philip Arnold's wife. He, so honoured, and so honourable, with his long line of worthy forefathers behind him, not one. of whom but had been of good report and fair fame. And what of her parentage? The thought of her old grandmother drinking day after day on her miserable bed in her miserable garret came vividly to her mind. She had never known any other relative.

If only Philip had never loved her, or never asked her to be his wife, she might have kept her secret. How happy she had been in her little cottage, and how quickly had the days gone by! She knew all the people and their affairs at Hazelmount, and had become as one of them. It would not have been necessary to tell them of her former life. This country village might have continued her home, her Garden of Eden. But she was to be driven out of it, for, now her eyes were open, she knew there was no one there that would not shrink away from her.

Yet if she told, all and went away, what good would come of it? She must appear as a witness against George Bassett; probably the one that would seal his fate, and send him to an awful doom. This was a matter to be pondered over, and weighed carefully in the balance, before she opened her lips in confession. She would be the cause of his death, perhaps unrepentant and unforgiven. There was no doubt in her mind that the struggled she had seen and thought so little of was the silent death-struggle between him and his victim. If she told who he was, there would be for her the shame and agony of bearing evidence against him, and for him the last awful penalty. What good could there be in that? It would not bring the murdered man to life again. No; she would keep her secret, and save herself and him.

She lifted herself up, stiff and aching as with some long and laborious task, and bathed her face and made her roughened hair smooth. She looked into the glass to see how tranquil she could make her face and how sweet a smile she could call to her lips; but there was some expression far back in the depths of her dark eyes which frightened her, as if some spirit not her own had taken possession of her. She gazed at herself with the fascination of terror, till all the colour faded out of her face and her mouth quivered instead of smiling. Yet she could not turn away from it.

What was this that was coining upon her? What agony of loss and desertion? She felt as if she was losing her, inmost strength; the waters, the proud waters, were too deep for her; they were overwhelming her soul. Was God hiding His lace from her?

The little old, well-worn Testament, in which she first read the life of Christ, lay on the table close to her hand. How well she remembered the night when she first opened it! She took it up in her cold hands. With an unconscious touch of superstition, she left it to chance to open the pages for her. Was it then chance that the yellow leaves opened where they did? Her eyes, dim and heavy with sorrow, fell upon these verses: 'And when He was at the place He said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. And He was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down and prayed, saying, "Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done."

She sank down on her knees and hid her face again. Oh, to do what was right! to do what God willed! The cup had not been taken away from her Lord; the shame and the spitting, the smiting on the face, the crown of thorns, the mockery and the jeering... His soul had been exceeding sorrowful, even unto death, and His Father had not delivered Him out of His afflictions. He endured the cross, despising the shame. And the servant could not be above her Master, nor the disciple above her Lord.

There was a plain path open to her, a path leading down into a valley darker than the valley of the shadow of death, but it must be trodden. She rose up to do it at once, and made baste to go down, for the hour was come when she must do the Lord's will, though her whole nature shrank from it. That it should be done quickly was all her desire.

Yet Carola paused for a minute or two at the door of the oak parlour. It was a half glass door, covered by a curtain of crimson silk; but the curtain had been drawn a little aside, and she could see all the pleasant room within. The thick curtains had been drawn across the windows, but the lamp .light and the fire-light fell upon the wainscoted walls, and made her all at once feel how cold and dark it was to be standing there outside. The table was set for tea, and a little brass kettle, as glittering as gold, was singing on the hob of the old fashioned grate. Mr. Arnold and Philip were reading, but Mrs. Arnold leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and a wistful expression on her face.

Carola opened the door so silently that none of them heard her or looked towards her. It seemed almost an impossibility to break this silence, and destroy all this tranquil happiness The dread of it drew a sob from her so deep and sad that every one looked up at her at once. The girl's face was wan and pale, and her eyes gleamed feverishly. She was shivering visibly, and her lips moved, though no sound came from them. Philip sprang to his feet to hasten to her, but with a sorrowful gesture she forbade it.

"Oh! I have come to tell you something," she cried; "perhaps I ought to have, told you before, but indeed I never thought of it. I am the girl George Bassett used to call his sweetheart; and now I know I saw that murder done."

"Carola!" exclaimed Philip, "it is impossible! You are ill and dreaming, my darling."

"No," she said most mournfully; "it is like a dream. Oh! if it could only be a dream! But it's true. I was standing on the wharf, and I saw the two men in a boat wrestling together as clearly as I see you now. But I never thought the man was murdered. I never beard anything of it, and just then my grandmother died --- that very night --- and all my life was changed. I never thought of it again till now."

"My child, sit down and tell us all this quietly," said Mr. Arnold; and she let him place her on a chair by his own, whilst Philip stood opposite to her, and Mrs. Arnold, leaning forward eagerly, gazed intently upon her.

"Oh!" she sobbed in short sentences, "perhaps I ought to have told you before; but it seemed to have gone out of my mind. When I was a little girl I lived there, at the East End, in one of the wickedest parts. Oh! it is horrible! Here you don't know how wicked and miserable people can be. And George Bassett lived in the same street. I didn't know it was any sin to get drunk --- that was almost the least wrong thing the people did. They were as ignorant and savage as heathens. No good person could have lived among them."

"But how did you come to be there?" asked Mrs. Arnold, for neither her husband nor son could utter a word.

"I was born there," she answered in a steadier voice, yet in a voice of despair; "my grandmother lived in a garret overlooking the river, and drank gin from morning to night. It is no wonder I took to drink it too. She was bed-ridden; and I was eighteen when she died. Then the Rector of St. Chad's sent me to school, and told me not to talk about my former life; and everything was so different and so good and beautiful, especially here, where I've been so happy, that it seemed as if I had forgotten it all."

"Carola," cried Philip, "is it true?"

"Oh! it's true!" she said. "I would give all my life to have it untrue. It all came back to me when I heard George Bassett's name. And now it seems as if I should bring shame and disgrace upon you; and I must forget you, and you must forget me. I know I can never be your wife."

There was a deathlike silence in the room. Mrs. Arnold rose and laid her hand tenderly on Philip's arm; she was sore at heart for the pain her boy was suffering, yet there was a secret satisfaction in knowing that he must come back to her for consolation and love. Outside, the frosty air was wailing round the closed window like the cry of some lost creature shut out from the warmth and comfort of the pleasant hearth. Carola lifted up her sad eyes to Philip's face; but he was not looking at her. He stood like a man in blank amazement, gazing intently on' the floor. It was impossible that this story could be true, yet it was impossible for it not to be true. There was a despairing positiveness in Carola's tones and words which forbade him to think she did not know what she was saying. The shock of it paralyzed him. Oh! Carol! his little Christmas Carol, who had made this Christmas Day the happiest day of his life, was it possible that she had been steeped in all this baseness and vileness? Could she have wound herself into his inmost heart if she had not always been the sweet, innocent, winsome girl she had seemed to him?

"Tell me what I ought to do," said Carola at last, turning to Mr. Arnold, who sat beside her. He took her icily-cold hand into his own as he answered her.

"My dear," he said kindly, "you spoke wisely when you said Philip and you must forget one another. But I'm grieved for you both from my very heart. You had better leave us at once --- to-morrow morning. Is there no old friend you could go to?"

"Yes," she replied, "I remember him now, and oh! I ought not to have forgotten him so! There was an old Jew, who was very kind to me, and taught me the Ten Commandments, and made me keep them. I will go to him."

"Is it near your old home?" inquired Mr. Arnold.

"It is my old home," she answered, shuddering; "but I must go to him, for he will know the exact time when I saw George Bassett on the river. It was the night my grandmother died, only I do not know the date. I was so ignorant then. But Matthias will know; and if it was that night the man was drowned, then I saw it."

"You must let the police know," said Mr. Arnold; "they will want your evidence on the trial".

"Yes," she continued, with a deep sob; "there will be a trial, and I shall have to tell all, and everybody will know! I can never come back here again."

"No, my dear," he replied; "it would be better not to come back again. But there are other village schools, and other places, and you've ways that will always win hearts to you. By-and-by you will get over this."

"But oh! I shall never love any people again as I have loved you all!" she moaned; "and what good would it be, if they cast me off when they knew all about me? If only I had died when I was so near dying! Why did God let me live any longer?"

But none of them could answer that question. Philip Arnold looked at her white and pitiful face for a moment and went away, and they heard his footsteps passing hurriedly through the hall and out into the moon-lit night. Then his mother wrung her hands, and turned angrily towards Carola.

"Why did you not tell us all this at once?" she asked. "Why did you come among us as an impostor? You have broken my boy's heart."

"I had almost forgotten it myself," repeated Carola weariedly. "The Rector forbade me to talk about it. If anybody, had asked me any questions, I should have told the truth. It seemed as if my Lord Himself had taken me quite away from my old life and made me altogether a new creature. But I shall have the worst to bear; and oh, if I could bear all Philip's trouble, how willing I should be!"

"I don't know how I can ever forgive you!" cried Mrs. Arnold.

Carola rose up silently, though the room was growing dusky to her eyes, and their forms were becoming indistinct. If she could only be alone again, out of the reach of their voices, alone with her great sorrow! She heard the clanging of the great fold-yard gate as it swung to and fro after Philip had passed through it, and she clasped her hands together with a gesture of profound grief. She could not bear his burden: her own was more than she could bear. Before she could reach the door she fell senseless to the ground.

Early the next day, before the late-rising sun was up, Carola was driven down to the nearest railway station by Mr. Arnold himself. It was a day's journey to London, and she could reach it only with starting by the earliest train. It was her earnest wish to leave Hazelmount before it was light for all was quite over now. This home of hers, her first real home, was casting her out as unworthy to remain in it. She could not even see the little homestead lying amid their gardens, and the pleasant lanes and fields which were as dear to her as if this had been her birthplace. They were shrouded in a darkness as black as her own future.

"I thought," she said, speaking half-aloud to herself, "that Christian people would never turn against me."

"My dear," answered Mr. Arnold, "you may be always sure of finding a friend in me. But this is different. We think more of character than anything else. We were a little grieved when Philip fell in love with you, though we loved you ourselves. But now you know yourself the thing is impossible. The Arnolds of Hazelmount have never had to be ashamed."

"Yes, but you don't understand it all," she said. "May I write to you some day and tell you all about my young days? I want you to think --- not badly of me."

"Ay, do," he replied heartily; "and may God bless and comfort you! Shall I telegraph to your old friend and tell him you are on your way to him?"

"No," she said, "I can find my way; but I do not know exactly bow to send to him. I know that part of London well."

The journey was long, and it was quite dark when she reached the last station. It was Boxing Day, and the streets were thronged with rough men and squalid women, who made a dreary pretence at pleasure, gathering most thickly round the spirit-vaults, where they were treating one another. The scene was terribly familiar, yet terribly strange, to Carola. Once she paused and stood still for a minute, asking herself why she was returning voluntarily to this life of degradation and misery. Nobody could compel her to come back. The world was all before her, and she could choose her own dwelling-place.

But there was an instinctive return of her heart to her first, and now her only friend. Christian people were casting her out, and turning their backs upon her; and to whom could she go but to the old Jew, who had so faithfully taught her God's commandments, and had done his utmost to keep her in the path of them? How wrong she had been to forget him all these years! how ungrateful! The recollection of his mild face, and the smile playing about his sunken mouth, and the kindly gleam of his deep-set eyes came to her, as if one going down into some nethermost pit should remember the face of a beneficent angel dwelling there. Matthias seemed to be waiting for her beyond these groups of noisy revellers, and Carola went on with her usually swift and firm step.

The Sabbath was just over for Matthias, for it was Saturday night, and he was about to take down his shutters and light the twinkling lamp he worked by on his bench. He might well have forgotten Carola, it was so long since he had lost sight of her. But though the bitterness of his disappointment that she was a Christian in spite of all he had done to save her had passed away, the memory of her remained fresh and green in his heart. He missed her most keenly on the Sabbath-day, when some Christian woman from the outcast herd of Gentiles came in to do his work, in the place of the pretty, sweet-voiced little maid whom he bad watched growing up. He had tried to do without fire and light through the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath; but he was too old to bear that. Many a Sabbath-day the tears had stolen slowly down his wrinkled face as he sat, solitary and sad, brooding over the fate of the child gone out from safety into the wild and wretched life of those, who called themselves followers of the crucified Nazarene. He had given up the hope of ever seeing her again. "Neither in this world, nor in the world to come," he often muttered to himself, shaking his head sorrowfully over the shoes he was patching.

Matthias had been grieving thus over Carola this evening, and the sun had gone down, bringing his Sabbath to a close an hour ago, without his perceiving it. Now he came down his spiral staircase into the small shop, and lit his lamp; but he felt loath to take down his shutters, though Saturday night brought his best hours of business. This Saturday night was a season of special and more odious revelry than usual; and all the vileness of the Christian rabble, whom Carola had chosen as her people, would force itself upon his notice. But as he hesitated, puckering his heavy eyebrows together, there came a low but steady knock at the closed door. Three or four voices were talking loudly on the other side of the door; but before he could take down the heavy bar the knock was repeated with more urgency.

"Matthias, let me in!" cried a voice which made his old hands tremble. He would have known it among ten thousand: his little Carol's voice, which had so often recited the Ten Commandments to him. He could hardly open the door for very eagerness; and there, standing on the step, and pressing forward, as if seeking refuge from a little knot of his Christian neighbours, stood Carola herself.

"I will see you to-morrow," she said to them eagerly, "not to-night. Go away now. I promise to see you to-morrow."

"Carol!" exclaimed Matthias, hardly able to trust his senses. "Is it Carol?"

"Yes," she answered, closing the door and fastening it in the face of her old comrades, "it is Carol come back again, if you'll have me, Matthias."

"The God of Israel be praised for this! the God of my fathers be praised!" he said fervently. "But is it really you, and no vision of the night?"

"Take hold of my hand," she replied, "and tell me if I can stay here a little while. I've no other home, and no other friend in all the world!"

"No other friend, and no other home!" he repeated as he followed her upstairs; and trimming the lamp there, which had burned low, be gazed eagerly, into her face. What a beautiful and graceful woman his little Carol had grown! How different from the wild, rough girl she was when she went away! "Our daughters are as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace," he said to himself; but then, alas! she was not one of the daughters of Israel. She had sunk down as one utterly worn out in his antique high-backed chair, and was looking up at him with a little glimmer of a smile in her dark eyes; but even his sight, dim with age, could not help seeing the wanness of her dear face and the sadness of her smile. She looked as if she had neither home nor friend.

"Has it been well with you, Carol?" he asked anxiously.

"Oh, it has been well," she answered; "but I have lost it all. I'm too tired to tell you to-night. Can you let me stay in the old garret for a time?"

"Ay, it's been kept as you left it, my dear!" he said. "I couldn't let anybody else live in the place. Only let me give you some food to eat; you'll feel better, my child, when you have eaten. Sit you still there whilst I wait on you. I'm not too old for that."

But when he tried to stir up the smouldering fire his hands shook too much for him to use the heavy poker. Carola roused herself and made him sit down, whilst she, to satisfy him, boiled the kettle and prepared supper as in the olden times. They ate together almost in silence; the old man was too overjoyed and Carola too sad and heart-troubled to talk much.

When the meal was over, she went up into the garret overhead. Yes, it was just as she left It; but how little there had been to leave! There was the low pallet-bed with its dingy counterpane, where she had been used to sleep the untroubled sleep of childhood beside her drunken grandmother. The broken chair and the little table standing in front of the few bars of rusty iron which formed the grate were there. The low broad window, with its broken panes covered with brown paper, or stuffed with rags, was unchanged, and through it the moon was shining, --- that moon which had shone down upon her in the pleasant chamber at the Grange only last night. Was it possible it could be only last night?

She knelt beside the window as she had knelt in the moonlight the night before. The bitter cup which last night pressed to her lips she was drinking now; and it was ten-fold more bitter than she had foreseen. For had she not been rejected and cast out and forsaken altogether? What had she been guilty of? From this familiar stand-point she looked back on her two lives, so distinct and separate. And as her childhood passed before her she saw for the first time what the old Jew had been to her, and what evils he had saved her from. He could not keep her from the knowledge of evil, but he had kept her from plunging into it. She had played on the brink of an abyss, but his hand had held her back from falling into it. A rush of tender gratitude for a minute or two swept away the sadder thoughts of her heart. She would never leave him again; he should be to her as a father, stricken with age, to be honoured and cherished and loved till death parted them.

It was not that she did not feel that her early life had been full of faults, but then she had known no better. As soon as she knew Christ she followed Him as 'truly as did the disciples who saw His form and heard His voice. He had forgiven her sins, and what did Christian people want more than that? If her Lord accepted her, why should they turn away from her? Did the disciples of old reject and despise Mary Magdalene, out of whom Christ had cast seven devils? Poor Carola it would have been impossible for her to understand the reasons which justified their conduct to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold.

She could not have been Philip's wife, she said to herself if he was ashamed of her. She knew how they prided themselves on their unstained name. But why should that have made them banish her from her little home, to which she would have gone back? and when he married some happier girl she would have seen their happiness from afar, and never grudged it. Did they look upon her as so contaminated that she was unfit to teach even their village children? Ah ! that her early sins were not only forgiven, but taken away.

She threw herself,, dressed as she was, on bed, and fell into a deep unbroken slumber, for her heart was heavy with sorrow. For a few minutes the hideous noises in the street below haunted her like bad dreams, though her ear was soon deaf to them. It was a long sleep, for she was worn out with fatigue, excitement, and grief; but when she awoke in the morning, her first thought, before trouble could thrust itself in upon her, was, "Christ loved me, and gave Himself for me."

It was with a smile, then, that Carola awoke to a new day. It was to be a day of humiliation and suffering. Hitherto her experience of Christian life had led her only among green pastures and beside still waters; and by-and-by it might be that her cup would again run over; but between now and then the valley of the shadow of death must be passed through. For now she began to see more clearly the terrible task that lay before her, which she must perform unaided and alone. There was no escape from that dark and rough road. By making her confession, and by coming back here, she had bound herself to bear fatal witness against the unhappy man accused of murder. She sat on the side of the bed pondering over it. The open court, the eyes of the people staring at her, the crowd of familiar yet terrible faces of those who had known her and George Bassett in bygone days, and who would flock to hear the trial. And George Bassett's face turned to her, intent upon every word she spoke; and what she had to say would seal his doom. Oh! if she could but have been spared this torture and disgrace!

She could hear presently through the badly-made floor that Matthias was getting breakfast, and she made haste to go down. He had been out, and spent his last shilling to buy some salted fish as a dainty to set before Carola; and as she came down the steep ladder, he met her with a smile on his withered face, full of happiness.

"It's like seeing the sun rise again to look on your dear face," he said.

"Have you missed me so much?" she asked.

"Sitting down and rising up, waking and sleeping, eating and fasting, I've missed you," he answered in a tone of mingled sadness and rejoicing; "but you've come back to me in the end of my days, and. I've a hope you'll never leave me again."

"Never!" she said fervently, laying her hand on his arm, and looking at him with tearful eyes. "I will take care of you as if I were your daughter."

His daughter! For a moment the old Jew's memory went back to his young wife and their infant child, whom he had laid, nearly fifty years ago, in the Jewish burial ground, and buried all his joy and happiness with them. But the memory flitted past like a fading vision; for here was Carola herself, with her warm hand upon his arm, and her living face close to his. Perhaps she might marry a Jewish husband yet. She had been out among the Christians, and found neither home nor friends with them.

"The Lord bless thee with a full blessing," he said solemnly, "for thou hast sought refuge under the shadow of His wings."

The shop was closed, for it was Sunday, and long ago the neighbours had made the old Jew understand he was not free to open it on their Sabbath, if he shut it on his own. There was still a hope lurking in Carola's heart that the night she saw George Bassett was not the night of the murder; then a part of her trouble would be spared her. With a sickening alternation of hope and dread she told Matthias what had brought her back to London.

"Ah!" he said, without surprise, "the police have been here asking after you, Carol; and I told them where you'd gone to school. For the rascal said he'd spent the night with you; and I could swear against him, for it was the very night your poor old grandmother died, and you were here at home all but one half-hour. We must go to the police, my dear. But he's committed for trial, and you'll not have to go before the magistrates; it comes on in two or three days, for I'm to bear witness he was not with you that night."

This, then, explained the commotion that had arisen in the street last night, when one of her old acquaintances had recognised her. It had startled and even frightened her, so much greater was it than she could account for. So she could not have kept her secret. if she would; the policeman from Market Upton might even now be seeking her, and would find her gone. There was a gleam of relief on the darkness of her sorrow that she had had courage to take up her cross, and had not waited for it to be laid upon her reluctant shoulders.

All day long the street was filled with crowds of curious people, for the whole neighbourhood was seething with excitement about this murder perpetrated four years and a-half ago. George Bassett had been a well-known personage amid the rough population; and Carola herself was no less well known. There had. been a mystery about her sudden disappearance which had tended to keep her. in their memory; and Matthias Levi's obstinate silence about her had increased the mystery, and increased greatly his own unpopularity among his Christian neighbours. Now Carola was come back as suddenly as she went --- no doubt to save her old lover from a terrible fate. They could not think otherwise; for who would give evidence against a former friend for a murder committed so long ago, that this evidence could only be given in cold blood? No; she was come to save him.

Carola was advised to keep herself closely within doors till the trial was over and the excitement abated. She spent most of her time in the garret overlooking the river, her heart laden now with many a heavy burden both of the past and the future. She wondered how she could have forgotten that past all these years, and lived her happy, pure, and simple life in the country. She loathed it with an absolute loathing. And yet, if she could but go amongst these people, her childhood's associates, and win them to Christ and to God, oh! how willingly would she dwell among them once more! Perhaps this was what her Lord would have her to do. The future was not altogether dark, as she thought of what she could do for them, and how she would lift them out of their misery into the peace which possessed her own soul.

But nothing could be done till the trial was over. Once she showed herself in the street, and she was instantly surrounded by her old neighbours. It was strange to them and to herself to mark the difference there was between what she was and what she had been. Here was Carola, who had been first and foremost in all their street brawls and wrangles, standing in their midst, a sweet, gentle, gracious woman, widely apart from them. They were of the lowest and most degraded type, and she was a modest and ladylike girl. They did not like the change; it was too great for them. But if she did what was right for George Bassett, and he got off clear,, she would be their favourite once more, in spite of all.

When Philip Arnold went out into the frost night of the Christmas Day which had bee the happiest day of his life, he felt as death would have been a far less bitter ending to it than this terrible shock of disaster. He almost mechanically, yet half-conscious of set purpose, retraced the paths along which he had wandered with Carola that afternoon At every step he could recall her words, the tender tones of her low voice, the light that lay in her shining eyes, the most modest an sweetest grace he had ever seen in woman. All that was best in him had been attracted to her. He felt that if he was to lead the truest life possible to him, it must be at her side; no other woman in the world could so help him to be what he might be.

That was all over. By her own confession she was a woman whom it would be utter disgrace to marry. Her birth, her early home and training, her whole life till a few years ago, had been such as to render her totally unfit to be his wife. He had overlooked her inferior station, in spite of the dissatisfaction openly expressed by his father and mother. But she was not the frank, simple Christian girl, the pure, innocent girl who had stolen into his heart the first moment he saw her. How was it possible that she could have been all she had been, --- so sweet, and fair, and winsome --- and yet have been so base a thing, so steeped in vice and wickedness? No; she was utterly unworthy to enter his honoured and unstained home.

It was after midnight before he returned home, and found only his mother sitting up for him. She had hoped that, being alone, he would have poured out his heart to her; but he could not help remembering how reluctantly she had yielded to the persistence of his love, and he did not expect to meet with real sympathy from her. There would be an element of triumph in it, which would spoil all its efficacy. Yet, when he found Carola gone the next morning before he was down, he wished he had been told of her intention to leave them at once. He would fain have seen her once more, if only to bid her farewell for ever.

During the course of the day two policemen from Market Upton came to the Grange to inquire after Carola. A bevy of the cottagers gathered together in the great kitchen, and with a slow and cautious enjoyment of the strange excitement discussed the events over point by point. Such a thing had never occurred in Hazelmount before; nobody had ever been associated with a murder, and it was almost a subject of congratulation that it had been none of the villagers themselves, but their schoolmistress only, who had been the witness of it. For all at once Carola was a stranger, a foreigner again; one whose forefathers had not been known, and who might therefore be capable of many misdeeds of which no native of Hazelmount could be guilty.

"She could not have hidden it if she would," said Mrs. Arnold to her husband.

"She did not know that," he answered; "it was a free confession, poor girl!"

When the day of trial drew near, Philip could no longer control his desire to see Carola again. Two or three of his acquaintances from Market Upton, relatives of the murdered man, were going up to London to be present at it; and he resolved, not to accompany them, but to go alone, and privately. Perhaps, if he saw Carola in the witness-box and heard her tell her story in public, it would effectually uproot the love which he felt powerless to destroy.

The court was crowded, for George Bassett had many boon companions, whose time was of little value, and the excitement of a trial their chief pleasure. Phillip could not have crushed in but for a policeman from Market Upton who knew him and made a way for him. He found himself at the back of a closely-packed assemblage; a crowd of the lowest class of the London poor, haggard, squalid, and stunted, dressed in dirty rags and dingy finery, with faces of a lower type than he had ever seen before. These were Carola's people, her kinsmen, --- the class she had sprung from. Her name was in all their mouths --- George Bassett and Carola --- they were linked together with hideous familiarity. When the prisoner was placed in the dock Philip forced himself to take minute notice of his brutal, dissipated face, his bloodshot eye, his heavy jaws and bull-dog neck, even to a black wart on his large cheek. His eyes seemed fastened to that repulsive face; and he stood staring at it, hearing nothing and taking no heed of time, in a sort of bewildered trance, until he heard Carola Fielding called as a witness.

There was a thrill of excitement in everybody about him. Yes, there she stood; and he groaned half-audibly as he turned his eyes towards her. For a moment he saw her as he had first seen her, facing the setting sun, and singing as the birds sing. But the sunny face was pale as death, and the shining eyes were dim, those eyes that had always shone with the light of joy and peace. And now there is not a sound in the court. Her sweet, clear voice has uttered the solemn oath, and its tones reach him as plainly as if they two were alone together in the little fir-coppice on the brow of Hazelmount. She is looking across at the prisoner to identify him, and all her face quivers for an instant. Yes, she knows him. Many questions are put to her, and she answers them simply and modestly; but her voice has an undertone of anguish as she replies to some of them.

"Yes, George Bassett had been called her lover, and he had kissed her once."

"Yes, she had been drinking the night her grandmother died; but she was not drunk. She had been drunk in the streets sometimes."

"How can she say it and live?" cried Philip to himself. He had not taken his eyes off the sweet, pale face, and the unconscious grace and sorrow of the girl's bearing. It was almost as if some innocent child was accusing itself of an impossible sin. But the people around Philip, when her testimony was given, cursed her with terrible and bitter curses for not saving her sweetheart; and he pushed his way out, heart-stricken, and given up to despair.

He hastened to leave London; for what good would it do to see Carola again? The two faces he had gazed upon were indelibly graven on his brain. George Bassett, a coarse and sensual brute, with his evil eye of recognition and terror fixed upon Carola. It haunted him, and seemed as if it must usurp the image of Carola, and reign over his memory in its stead. What a horrible remembrance to dwell in his tranquil home and to walk about the old lands with him! Home appeared dark and mournful as he travelled towards it. How could he take up life again, and tread the accustomed paths, and pursue the trivial round of every-day work? Every spot of his old homestead and farm would be desecrated by the remembrance of Carola. If she had died only, he might have cherished every thought of her, as of one who had gone to be among the angels, from whom she had seemed to come. But what, a cursed reality was this!

He could not utter a word either to his father or mother when he reached home; and they kept silences seeing how bitter his trouble was. But the next morning there came a letter for Mr. Arnold, which he read aloud to his wife and son before they separated for the day's work.

"I asked you if I might write," said Carola, "and you told me I might. I want you to understand and not to blame me too much. I have just come back from the court where they are trying George Bassett. I do not know what his sentence will be, but I had to answer some questions which you will not understand when you hear them at Hazelmount."

"I was born in this garret where I am writing. My father and mother were dead, and my grandmother was bedridden. I had to go about the streets for all that we wanted, especially to the gin-palaces, for she used to drink a great deal of gin. We lived as if we were very poor; I was often hungry, and always ragged. But, as far as I was concerned myself, I was where God had placed me. I did not choose my birth-place or my kindred."

"I should have been as wicked and miserable as the other girls I knew but for an old Jew, whose house we lodged in.It seems to me now that he is the best man I ever knew. I did not know what I owed to him; as far as possible, he kept me from harm and ruin, and the only thing I did to grieve him was to drink a little of what my grandmother was always drinking. I was in danger of becoming a drunkard, but I never drank habitually; and I did not know it was wrong. Even Matthias could not tell me it was breaking one of the Ten Commandments which he taught me and was so earnest for me to keep."

"My grandmother died when I was nearly eighteen, and at her funeral the chaplain gave me his New Testament. I had never heard of my Lord Jesus Christ, and it was all new to me --- every word. Oh, if I had only words to tell you what it was like for me to find out suddenly that Jesus Christ had lived in this world, and died to save us! There was so much I had to be saved from, and Matthias had never been sure that his God would receive me. I had found my Lord, and it was all a new life to me. Then I went to a clergyman and told him I wanted to go to a school where I could learn all about Jesus Christ, and he sent me to that school in the country where Mrs. Stewart chose me to come to Hazelmount and be the village schoolmistress there."

"I want to say that I scarcely ever thought of all my bad former life. Every day was so filled up with pleasant work, and I was so happy, that it seems to me now I had not time to think about it. Old Matthias Levi was so angry at me for becoming a Christian, he never wrote to me; and whenever the recollection of him came across my mind I drove it from me, because he had cursed my Lord, and was like the Jews that crucified Him. So it seemed to me then; but now I know better. He had never known Jesus Christ, and the people here who, he thinks, are Christians are enough to make him hate Christianity. I have promised him I will never leave him, but will take care of him as if I was his daughter."

"I think if I stay here with the people among whom I was born I may do them good, and win some of them to believe in Christ, for they do not know Him; they are like those who crucified Him; and He said, 'Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.' I have money enough for myself, and I can give all my time to them. If that is what God will have me to do, I shall be a better servant to Him perhaps, and I shall be happier by-and-by, perhaps, in this miserable and wicked place than if I lived at Hazelmount, which is like Paradise to me. Oh, yes! I begin to see that our Lord, though He was a man of sorrows, was happier here, saving the world, than if He had stayed for ever in heaven at the right hand of God."

"Do not think that if any of you had asked me any questions I should not have told you. I was not wilfully silent. But what else could I have done than what I did? As soon as I knew about Jesus Christ I loved Him and believed in Him, and He forgave my sins, and saved me from all my misery. I could not blot out all those years when I knew nothing."

"George Bassett was not my lover. I always dreaded him, and hid myself away from him, but he kissed me once against my will. I was only seventeen then."

"This is what I have to say to you. I shall not see any of you again, because I know how degraded I must seem in your sight. But, oh, do not think more hardly of me than you need think! Be a little sorry for me, because my life was all spoiled before it was in my own hands. Yet it is not all spoiled; that was a wrong thing to say. Nothing can alter the love my Lord has for me, and I can be His servant anywhere. If the gate of my Paradise is closed against me, He has opened the gate of heaven to all believers."

"I see what her life has been pretty clearly, poor child!" said Mr. Arnold, folding up the letter.

"Very sad!" responded Mrs. Arnold; 'but nothing can alter the fact that she was born amidst vice and sin --- amongst the lowest of the low. She could never come here to be Philip's wife and the mother of his children. That could never be. We owe some duty to our ancestors and to our descendants."

Neither Mr. Arnold nor Philip made any reply; but when, later in the day, she asked her husband for Carola's letter, he said he had given it to Philip, and she did not think it wise to reopen the subject with him.

They were not short of money, for Carola had received her last half-year's salary, and the interest was due upon the money in the Consols; Matthias also had the few pounds his furniture and stock had brought to him. There was nothing to keep them in London, for neither of them had a friend there, and there would be, moreover, some danger for them in staying, even at a distance from their old abode. But they had no friends in any part of the country, for Carola would not return to that distant Hazelmount which was as a closed Garden of Eden to her. She could not even go into the same county, for fear of giving pain to Philip Arnold and his parents She chose rather to seek a home as far off as possible, and as that lay northward, she turned her face to the south.

They found what suited them in a wide straggling parish, part of which lay in the New Forest. It was a cottage containing four little rooms, with a garden, run wild, behind it, whilst before it stretched a wide rounded sweep of partially cleared land, with here and there a pollard tree standing. It had probably been a charcoal-burner's cottage, and no other dwelling was within sight. Carola was attracted to it by its stillness, and the broad field of sky which brooded over the wild landscape. She was longing to be tranquil for a time, and to knit up the ravelled threads of her life. As for Matthias, he was in a haze of bewilderment, leaving everything to Carola, and not unhappy as long as she was in his sight. Yet the solitary little house, with its tangled and overgrown garden lying under the wintry skies, was totally different from anything that had hitherto come into his life's experience. But he made himself busy under Carola's direction, and by-and-by the place became more comfortable and homelike, and their quiet country life together began. A new cobbler's bench was set for him under the cottage window with its diamond panes, and he sat down to it, whilst Carola went about the work in the house and the garden, as if her very existence depended upon having no idle moments.

But there was no cobbling for Matthias to do. Most likely if there had been any he could not have done it, for the handle of his new hammer did not fit into his hand as the old one he had grown used to, and he missed the worn old bench with its familiar notches. But often whole days passed by with no human being coming in sight of their lonely dwelling. It was February, a rainy month, and the lanes were heavy with mud, and the trees overhanging them were dripping with moisture. The nearest hamlet was more than half an hour's walk away, with no road to it except these wet and winding lanes. The old man, who for thirty years had worked with the ever-changing and busy spectacle of a London 8treet passing before his eyes, would often sink into a half-dream as he sat listlessly at his useless bench; he seemed to see the flitting to and fro of many forms, and hear the constant tramp of unnumbered feet. Then be would wake up suddenly to the fact that in this strange place there was neither form nor sound --- no presence save the beloved presence of Carola.

"Matthias," she said to the dreaming old man on the second Friday evening after they had entered their cottage, "have you forgotten that it is the Sabbath?"

The sun had set behind the rounded outline of the half-cleared land before them; yet he had not left his seat at the cobbler's bench. He had forgotten; there was nothing to remind him that his day of rest had come round again. Carola brought to him his old well-worn prayer-robe and the Polish cap he had been used to wear, and set his face eastward that he might pray towards Jerusalem. But though he began his prayers in his quavering voice, he soon broke off again, and a few heavy tears stole down his furrowed cheeks.

"I've forgotten the words, Carol," he cried, lifting his shaking hand to his forehead: "it is the Sabbath, but I have forgotten how I can pray to the Lord my God."

For a minute or two she stood beside him with her brows knit and her dark eyes looking pityingly into his saddened face. With all her might she was striving to recall the few Hebrew words she had uttered as prayers when she was a child.

"Listen!" she said; "was it this?"

Matthias smiled his gentle, pleasant smile, and repeated after her what she could remember. But she could recollect little, and again his face grew troubled.

"I am cut off from His holy temple!" he cried.

"Let me say a prayer for you," she said. softly; "it was made by one who was a Jew, but I only know it in English. The Lord God will hear it in English as well as Hebrew."

Standing beside him, her hand in his, and with her face towards Jerusalem, Carola repeated the Lord's Prayer in her sweet, clear, tender voice. The simple sentences were such as the old man's clouded mind could partly comprehend; and when she said reverently "Amen!" he joined in the familiar word.

"It is a good prayer," he said, as he laid aside his robe; "but I shall recollect my own before next Sabbath comes."

To Carola the utter stillness and monotony of her new dwelling was at first a relief. There were so many things to think of and ponder; and here there was no call upon her attention except her few household duties. The last two months had exhausted her strength, and she needed time and leisure to recruit it. Her love for Philip Arnold had scarcely made itself known to herself before the terrible shock of hearing of George Bassett had roughly shaken it --- possibly had uprooted it altogether. The whole course of events had been bitter and antagonistic to her. She had been tossed to and fro upon a sea of troubles, and this lonely cottage was a safe and quiet haven to her.

The hatred of her old companions preyed upon her and haunted her, as she strove to weary herself with hard work in the neglected garden. It was this unexpected and undeserved hate that was her crowning sorrow. She felt no bitterness now against the people at Hazelmount, making careful allowance for them and their pride in their forefathers. She thought of Philip Arnold with a patient grief, resigned to having lost him and the home that had seemed so happy to her. But to think of herself as a creature abhorred and bated by her own people, those whom she had pitied with a great and yearning pity, was indeed to be crucified with her Lord. The sharpness of it must wear off a little before she could mingle again with her fellow-creatures.

There was no one to notice in those days that Carola left off singing. Matthias did not miss it, for she had not sung in the poverty-stricken old garret with her bedridden grandmother living in it. It had been one of the delights of her new life. Often, when her heart ached sorely, she would sit down by the old man and chat with him; and at these times he felt that it was well with him to be here with Carola. If she might only have talked to him of Christ, and read His wonderful life aloud, the consolation of it would have been greater than anything else to her. But that name, which was literally dearer to her than any other name, could not pass her lips. To him Jesus of Nazareth was the God of the Christians, those persecutors of his people in all ages, robbers and murderers in the name of their God. He had known no Christians but the drinking, blasphemous, and vicious crew who bad driven .him from his home, and whose jeers and mockings had followed him through thirty years of a just and honest and industrious life spent in their midst. Carola knew that it was worse than useless to speak to him of Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

So the long weeks passed by, bringing no change to them. Now and then Carola had to go into the village to buy food, but she did not loiter there, for Matthias always piteously implored her to make haste home again. One dread had taken possession of his enfeebled brain --- that Carola would some day go away and be lost to him for ever. As long as she was absent he stood on the door-sill or at the garden wicket, his dim eyes fastened on the spot where she had vanished out of sight, and where he would catch the first glimpse of her when she came back. His weary bent old shoulders and head was the last thing she saw as she turned to wave her hand to him on going, and it was the first to greet her as she returned. It was in vain she carried a chair down to the gate; still, as if impatient to see a little farther, he was always standing up and peering anxiously through his sunken eyes at the place which had hidden her from him. He was like a timid child forsaken of his playfellows, and faint of heart lest every one had forgotten him.

Every Friday evening it was necessary for Carola to remind him that the Sabbath had begun, and his feeble memory failed him when be tried to repeat his Hebrew prayer. But Carola stood always at his side, and when the slow tears of old age came into his eyes she was ready with her clear, quiet utterance of the Lord's Prayer. He learned the simple petitions easily, and as she said them his quavering tones joined in with hers. Even during the week she would often hear him murmuring one or two of the short sentences. His solemn, gentle voice would cry, "Thy kingdom come!" Or when her whole heart was sick and her head bewildered, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!" came to her as a message direct from heaven. Matthias would himself brighten up and smile as he caught the sound of his own voice, and then he would turn fondly towards Carola. "That's a good prayer, my dear," he would say; "but I shall recollect my own by-and-by, before the Sabbath comes again."

The excitement produced by the trial and execution of George Bassett for the murder of one of the Lumleys of Market Upton was partly dying away in Hazelmount, though events were made the most of there, being few and far between. But the lambing season and the sowing of the spring corn were engrossing a good deal of thought and attention. A new mistress had been appointed to take Carola's place, and school had begun again. Nobody now mentioned Carola's name in the hearing of Mrs. Arnold or Philip, either from forgetfulness or from a feeling that it would give them pain.

A dark shadow had fallen upon the old homestead. There was always a consciousness in Mrs. Arnold and Philip that the other was thinking of Carola; it was no longer possible to them to resume their former happy and free intercourse of thought and feeling. Philip was even more reticent with his mother than with his father. He discovered, to his own astonishment, that he could not tear out of his heart his love for Carola. He admitted that it was his duty to his house to do so, repeating the time-honoured formula that no stain must rest on the name of any person received into it. He reminded himself that for generations past every man and woman dwelling under the old roof-tree had been worthy of it. But then Carola's sweet face seemed to look at him wistfully, and he could hear her voice saying, 'Am I, then, unworthy? I was where God had placed me. I did not choose my birthplace or my kindred.'

He knew her letter word for word. He thought of it as he rode about the fields or stood in the market-place at Market Upton; he dreamed of it at night. Never could he pass the field-gate where he had first seen her without seeing her again by the inward eye, as he had done then. The places were haunted by her, and the seasons. Words she had uttered --- little, trivial words --- seemed to spring up like seed which had been sown and forgotten months ago. No woman could ever be to him again what Carola had been.

Mrs. Arnold was not much less troubled. She had yielded grudgingly to Philip's love for Carola, but it had been sufficient to open her eyes to the charm there was in the girl. She understood now how the simplicity of her faith came to exist; she was in something of the same position as the early Christians, whose hearts had not grown dull with the frequent repetitions of the old, old story. It had been possible for Carola 'to eat her meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with all the people.' There had been none of the restrictions and limitations and accommodations of modern Christianity for her; she had contracted no habit of religious profession. Christ's teachings had come to her with the freshness and force they had in apostolic days, before there were divisions in the Church, or any grave questionings as to their intrinsic meaning. She was in the childhood of the faith, and there was present in her none of that worldliness which has become so subtly interwoven with modern Christianity that it seems impossible to separate them.

For in her heart of hearts Mrs. Arnold knew, even as Philip knew, that there was no valid objection to urge against his marriage with Carola, except a worldly one. It was only the dread of breaking one of the world's commandments that kept him from her side. They had seen her too long, and knew her too well, to think that any blame attached to her. The girl was pure, not from ignorance, but with the true virtue of one who knows evil and cleaves to good. Mrs. Arnold discovered that she could not pray about this trouble as she had done about others. The will of God was not her desire, if it decreed that Carola should be her son's wife.

But after a few weeks had passed by Philip could no longer restrain his longing to know something more of Carola. His father had written a few lines to her immediately after receiving her letter, but they had come back to the Grange with 'Insufficient address' written on the envelope. No other sign of Carola's existence had reached them, and this silence tended to fan Philip's desire to see her once more, perhaps to speak to her, to ask her if there was no help or friendship he could give her, possibly to tell her again how much he loved her, though there could be no hope of their marriage. He might even say to her that if he was himself only a stronger man he would not give her up. God had joined them together; it was the world that was putting them asunder.

"Mother, I must run up to London," he said one day early in March.

"To find Carola?" she asked with a look and tone of bitter disappointment.

"Yes," he answered. "I can bear it no longer. Who knows what trouble she may be in? But don't be afraid. I'm not going to ask her to be my wife, unless, indeed, we could go together to one of the colonies ---"

She interrupted him with a cry of sharp find sudden pain, and clasped his arm between her hands, as if she could forcibly restrain him.

"No, no," he said; "I did not think you would let me leave you and the old home. But, oh! mother, she is as good as gold, and I can hardly bear to lose her, and I ought to know what has become of her. Is she living amongst those wretches still? It will be like hell to her, though Carola will be happy in her religion; well," he added half shyly, and in a lower tone, "she will be happy in Christ, wherever she may be, and whatever she may be doing."

"And you will only make sure she is happy?" said his mother. "You will do nothing rash?"

"I'll not make myself happy and you unhappy," he answered.

It was a bitterly cold evening, with a sharp east wind blowing, when Philip turned into the street where he expected to find Carola. There were fewer people than usual loitering about the pavements; but the spirit-vaults were full to overflowing, and through the constantly-swinging doors he caught glimpses of the haunts of Carola's childhood. Young girls with feverish faces and wild gestures, laughing and shouting amid the drinking crowd, looked as Carola might have looked. He shrank from the sight with a shudder of recoil and repugnance. Was it possible that a fair flower could spring from such a soil? Yet he could not give up his search for her. He paced the street slowly from end to end, but failed to find the Jewish cobbler's little shop. Then he stopped a haggard, broken-down woman, who was slinking along as if she was dogged by terror, and asked her if she knew a man named Matthias Levi, or a girl called Carola Fielding.

"Is it Carols?" she said. "To be sure, I know Carols; her as was George Bassett's sweetheart. Ay! she lived along with the old. Jew shoemaker. Are you lookin' for them?"

"I want to find their home," he replied.

"That's it," she said. "That's where Carols and the old Jew used to live. till the folks about here drove 'em away. And he were very good to my little ones, he were. He'd shoe 'em for nothing many and many a time. We've missed him sorely."

She pointed out the two windows with every pane broken and roughly barricaded with deal planks. The shop door was fastened with a padlock, and it was plain enough that nobody had been living there for some time.

"They stole away in the night," said the woman, in a cautious under-tone, and looking about her as she spoke. "Folks about here were mad against Carols for speakin' against her old sweetheart, and they'd have tore her to pieces almost the day he were hanged. They smashed all the windows in; but hers was at the back, and they didn't hurt her, nor the old Jew, poor man! Only the next day but one a stranger came with a cart and took all their things away, and then we knew as they were clean gone, Matthias and all; and many a poor child 'll go bare-foot on the cold stones now that he'd have put good shoes on. God bless him! I say, though he is only a Jew."

"And does no one know where they are gone?" asked Philip.

"Nobody," she replied. "Bless you! they didn't want anybody to know. Why! they'd have murdered her if she'd ha' stopped here. I've known Carols a many years; she was always a spirity child, but never did no harm; and she were like a angel to her old grandmother. I wish one o' my girls were like her. And she's quite a lady now, and spoke as humble and pleasant as one of us. She said to me, 'I'm coming back to live at home again here, and I want to help all of you and make you as happy as I am myself.' And she told me some beautiful words that Jesus Christ once said, 'Come to me, folks that labour and are heavy worked, and I will give you rest.' I often sing 'em to myself, and may be Carols could ha' told me how to go to Him."

"That is like my Carol," thought Philip. In the midst of her own sorrow and anguish she had sought to carry comfort and light to those around her. He turned away from the house with all his hope gone of seeing her again. He had not quite resolved upon talking with her, even if he had found her. What good would it do? But she was gone away, no one knew whither. He made inquiries at the police-station, but nothing was definitely known there of Matthias Levi and Carola Fielding. Every police-station in the kingdom could be communicated with if be desired it; but he did not see what would be gained by the investigation. He had not much to say to Carola. She was not destitute of money, and there was no fear of her failing to find employment wherever she went. Perhaps it was best for them both to lose sight of each other. At any rate, it would be best for her; for some day, perhaps, she would meet with and love a better and a stronger man than he felt himself to be.

When the long sweet days of spring came, with their ruffling winds and bright half-opened leaves dancing in the changeful sunshine, and birds singing merrily from earliest dawn to latest dusk, Carola could not help throwing off some of her sadness. She, too, began to sing; and Matthias, as he sat unoccupied at his new bench, or stood bareheaded in the warm sunbeams, heard her as she moved about the house and garden, and the clear words came to his ear, accustoming it to the name he had so long abhorred. But the time to hate was gone by; his mind was growing duller, and this name no longer stirred him to wrath, uttered as it was by Carola's beloved voice. A great calm had fallen upon him, a season of perfect rest, blended a little with a feeling of weakness and weariness. His old life had passed quite away, and, like a child, he was living from day to day merely satisfied with the sound of her voice and the sight of her face, as a child is contented with his mother's presence.

The neighbours came about them a little now the roads were drier, talking in their loud, slow country accents, which suited the old Jew's dulled hearing. They did not know he was a Jew; he was nothing more to them than a very old man, too infirm to get about. There was no clergyman living within four miles of them, for their cottage was at the farthest corner of a straggling parish, and too remote for being visited. Now and then Carola went to the small chapel of ease in the nearest hamlet, where a service was held on Sunday afternoon, but she could not often leave her grandfather, as Matthias was supposed to be, and no one missed her if she was absent. There was not very much churchgoing among the scattered population.

By-and-by the old man's ebbing strength did not allow him to quit his bed. This feebleness came on so gradually that there was no shock in it, either to Carola or himself. He was very old, and the complete change in his mode of life had hastened the end. But Carola did not guess that the end was near; the only other old person she had known was her grandmother, who had been bed-ridden many years, and she looked without dismay on the prospect of tending Matthias for years to come. He was very peaceful and happy, lying tranquilly on his bed, and listening to her with a placid smile as she read aloud the Psalms of David the King, or the writings of the prophets of his own race. He had never possessed an English Bible, and the fragments he had learned of them in Hebrew during his schooldays and his middle life when he frequented the synagogue, had passed away from his memory. Now he heard them in his own tongue, and his heart grew full of them. It was too late for him to learn them, or to read them to himself, but Carola was always near at hand and willing to read his favourite passages over and over again, filling the old Jew's feeble mind with the music of verses, which he hardly understood, but which he would know better by-and-by.

"Oh! if you'd only let me read what I love better still!" said Carola, one day, as she turned over the leaves of her Bible, after reading the words, 'He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.'

"Ay! read what you love best, Carola, my dear," he answered, looking fondly at her from under his shaggy grey eyebrows; "if it's good for you it'll be good for me. There's something that has made you better than any daughter of my own people that I ever knew. But you mustn't ask me to forsake the Lord God of my fathers."

"No, oh, no!" she replied fervently; "is He not the Father of us all? Only let me read to you about my Lord!"

With eager and tremulous tones she read to him the story of the Lord's death. She had always shrunk from reading it aloud, so powerfully did it touch her; and as she went on from verse to verse the sorrow and the mystery of it grew upon her, until, when she came to the words, 'And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they bowed the knee before Him, and mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews,' she could control her faltering voice no longer, and falling down on her knees beside the old Jew's bed, she burst into a passion of tears.

"Why, my Carol! my dear!" he cried, stroking her head with his bent fingers, "do you love Him so? It's a hard thing to read that of one you love. You mustn't read any more of that to me."

"Oh, but I must!" she said, looking up at him through her tears. "You'll never know what my Lord is like till you've heard all about Him. But wasn't He 'despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief'? And listen how they crucified Him."

Matthias listened to the end, gazing at Carola's pale and sorrow-stricken face, as she strove to make her tremulous voice clear and steady. When it was finished she closed the book with a deep-drawn sigh, and he shut his eyes, and lay for a few minutes in silent thought.

"I'm too old to remember," he said at last, "but our wise men and rabbis used to say something about all that; and I've known a many Christians, too many Christians, but you are different to them, Carol, and you shall read it over again if you love it best; and the Lord my God will pardon me if I sin in this matter."

Now Carola was free to read in the New Testament, she did so gladly, choosing such passages as she thought least likely to arouse his old prejudices, and putting for the hated name of Jesus Christ the title of 'my Lord.' It was more grateful to the old Jew's ear, for be seemed to be listening to the history of Carol's Lord, not of the Jewish impostor, whose name for many centuries had been accursed. It sounded to him like a very new and very personal narrative, as if Carola was telling him what she had herself seen and heard her Lord do and say. It was more easy to remember and ponder over in the long sleepless hours of the night than the Psalms or Prophecies; and many a time when Carola was lost to him in sleep he thought of her Lord going about healing the sick and giving sight to the blind, even raising the dead to life again and forgiving sin. And this benevolent Lord had always spoken of the Lord God Almighty as the Father in heaven. Could not he, Matthias Levi, call God Father?

These thoughts did not trouble him; they seemed to enfold him as a sort of sweet and tranquil atmosphere, or as a strain of melody not understood, but soothing away distress. There was another and a better Christianity than that which he had known; but he no longer thought of the past with its evil memories. The days and weeks passed peacefully and happily away; and he felt it was very good for him to lie still and be waited on by Carola.

"You'll be very lonely when I'm gone, my dear," he said one evening after she had made his bed and lifted him back into it, almost as if he was a child again.

"Yes, I shall be lonely." she answered; "only my Lord said just before He died, 'I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.' When we lose all we find Him."

"Is that in your book?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied; "and just before that He said, 'In My Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.' He is preparing a place for us, Matthias."

"If there are many mansions," he said feebly, "perhaps He'll let you and me have a little one together, Carol. I used to be afraid you were lost to me for ever."

"Oh, He couldn't let us lose one another!" she answered, smiling.

He fell asleep smiling as she had done, and she watched beside him whilst he slept. For at last she knew that the end was very near, and the messenger of death might come at any moment. There was sadness, but no distress in her heart; she was sorrowing as those who sorrow not. His death would leave her altogether alone, but she did not dread that. There must be some place for her in the world; some footpath, however narrow and thorny, along which she could follow Christ. She sat with her eyes fastened on the furrowed face of the dying man, recalling the days when she was a child, when he bad guarded her from the evil that encircled her. At last he woke again, and met her wistful gaze.

"My Carol," he murmured feebly, "I'd like to make you happy before I go away, but I'm afraid to grieve the Lord my God. If your Lord is the Messiah, He will pardon me."

"Oh, yes!" she answered eagerly, "He will pardon you."

He closed his eyes again, and lay still for a time talking to himself in faint under-tones. Carola caught a word now and then, and knew he was murmuring in broken sentences, "And now, O man! what doth He require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

Once, after a long pause, she heard him whisper: "'Our Father which art in heaven.' That's a good prayer, Carol." Then he lay silent, dreaming perhaps, for a smile rested on his face; but he woke up with a look of trouble and bewilderment, and spoke in a loud and urgent voice. "There's something I've forgotten," he said; "help me to remember, Carol."

He was struggling to lift himself up, and she raised him in her arms, and laid his white head on her shoulder, speaking to him soothingly, as she would pacify a troubled child.

"Turn my face towards Jerusalem," he whispered; "then I shall remember."

She moved him a little on the bed. The sun was setting, and through the window she could see all the long shadows stretching eastward. Then, with her cheek bent down on his wrinkled forehead, she told him he was facing the city of his forefathers, the Holy City.

"I remember," he cried, in a tone of solemn triumph; "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord!"

Carola laid him down again on his bed, but he spoke no more. Only as she knelt by him, with his band in hers, she felt now and then a little pressure of his fingers, growing feebler each time, until it ceased altogether; and she knew that he was gone.

She buried him in the parish churchyard, and the same service was read over him as over her drunken grandmother. It did not occur to Carola that any other mode of burial should be found; and the clergyman of the district church knew nothing of the dead man's religion and nationality. Again she stood by the open grave as the only mourner, and looked down upon the coffin lying in its narrow bed, and listened to the solemn words, "We commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ."

"Matthias has seen his Messiah now," she thought, as the tears ran down her pale cheeks. "God is no respecter of persons," she said to herself as she returned alone to her empty cottage, "but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him."

And now Carola was utterly alone in the world. The long summer days dragged slowly away, for there was no longer any claim upon her for loving service. It seemed useless to prepare meals when there was no one but herself to sit down to them, and she ate such food as gave her least trouble, just as she had been wont to snatch a crust of bread in her childhood, eating it in any corner where she could find a seat. A little of the wildness of that time returned to her as she rambled aimlessly about the fields and the rough uncleared lands, where pollard-trees stood, quaintly misshapen, along the hedgerows. She was living again in her mind through the various changes that had come to her; and in her listless saunterings to and fro the thought of George Bassett's death began to bring undue terror and depression to her. It was a horrible thing to have borne fatal witness against a fellow-creature.

To go in and out of her house, to lie down and sleep, and to rise up and work only for herself, with no face to look upon, and no voice answering hers, was insupportable to her. Yet she wanted some indication as to what her Lord would have her do. Quite literally she believed the words He had said:"As Thou hast sent Me into the world, so have I also sent them into the world." She did not think He meant only those disciples who followed Him in His lifetime on earth. She took it for granted that Jesus Christ had sent her into the world; and, if so, what was the work He required her to do?

But no sign of His will came to her, and after a while she began to frequent the cottages which lay scattered among the fields and lanes. It was a large parish, and the church was a long way off. There was no resident squire or any family wealthy enough to take the lead among the sparse population. The poor barren land was divided into small farms, giving employment to two or three labourers on each, whose wages were low, and whose houses were mere hovels. The best and brightest among the boys and girls deserted their native place as soon as they could earn their own living, leaving behind them the dull and idle or those of indifferent character, whose work was done grudgingly, and whose only recreation was drinking bad beer in the dreary and dirty little public-houses.

Carola tried to go amongst them as she had gone amongst the cottagers at Hazel-mount, but they were altogether different from those contented and intelligent people. Here she was not made welcome in their comfortless hovels, and her visits were considered an intrusion. She had not any position or authority amongst them as she had in Hazel-mount, and they could not understand any friendly advances made with no thought of personal advantage. Many of them looked upon her suspiciously, as a young woman living alone in a solitary cottage, with no visible means of subsistence. Only the little children and the very aged made friends with her; but her home was too far away for them to visit her, and only in the lanes could she play and talk with them, for in their own dwellings she was treated coldly as a suspicious stranger.

To speak to these people of what her heart was full of only provoked a stare of stupid astonishment or indifference. All that sort of talk was for the parson to say to them on their death-beds, as a sort of charm to save them from going to a worse place than even this poor world was to them. It had nothing to do with those who could get through a day's work, and draw their scanty wages at the week's end. Even the overworked curate who conducted the Sunday afternoon services in the small chapel of ease considered her too open and enthusiastic in her religion for a Church woman, and half imagined her a Methodist in disguise, though she regularly attended his ministrations now Matthias was gone. There was a mystery about her, and a mystery about a young and pretty woman is always to her discredit.

Carola herself was beginning to feel in her inmost heart this general listessness and indifference creeping over her. Her soul was melting with heaviness. At Hazelmount the fervid and affectionate response which met more than half way every effort she made to endear herself to the parents of her scholars had kept the flame burning very brightly on the altar of her own spirit. Her vivid joyous sense of the reality of the Lord's life on earth, and the power of His words, had awakened in them an answering gladness. Her emotion had never failed to kindle theirs, and the result had been a gentle yet fervent excitement which had gilded all the dullness of everyday existence. But here, though she could get the people to complain of their own lot, or speak spitefully of their neighbours, they had not a thought to utter about Him who had. lived and died for them. And Carola was as one who tells an idle tale when she spoke of Him.

The loneliness of her position began to oppress her more and more heavily, yet still there came no sign as to what she ought to do. There was neither fiery nor cloudy pillar to guide her. The idle time hung wearisomely on her hands, and the often-read story in the New Testament seemed at last little more than words to her, over which her eye glanced without taking in their meaning. Was this the way in which Christians read the record of their Lord's history?

She resolved to quit this lonely place and useless life, and go away, whither she knew not. It was a strange position to be in. It was impossible to go back among her own people in their deep misery and degradation, for there would be danger, not for herself only, but for them, in their bitter hatred of her, lest any of them should be hurried into crime. 'They will learn nothing that is good from you,' the policeman had said; and she knew too well that she could not venture to dwell among them.

So she disposed of the little furniture she had bought, and made ready to go. The last morning was come, and she was sitting on her door-sill looking across the half-cleared land stretching before her, and watching the branches of the trees lifting themselves languidly in the soft autumn breeze, and shedding one by one their brown leaves, as if weary of their summer foliage, when she saw the letter-carrier plodding over the field in the direction of her cottage. He approached her garden wicket and called out loudly, "Miss Fielding." She ran down the narrow path, her heart throbbing violently, for she had not received half-a-dozen letters in her whole life, and here was one for her the very day she was going away. She did not recognise the handwriting; how should she when there was no friend's writing familiar to her? In a moment her thoughts flew to Hazelmount. Suppose it was Philip writing to her!

But no, that could not be. And then the next instant came the recollection that she had written to the ladies in whose school she had been educated, at Matthias Levi's urgent desire when he lay dying, telling them frankly her whole story, and asking for their counsel and friendship. Matthias had sent a special and pathetic message to them; but no answer came before his death, and Carola had scarcely thought about it since. When she had thought of it, it had only been with a feeling that they too considered her unworthy of their regard. But now the answer was here: They had gone out to New Zealand, and Carola's letter had followed them; they were replying to it hurriedly, but they bade her go to Netherton Hospital, and inquire there for Sister Elizabeth, who would certainly befriend her. They were forwarding Carola's letter to her, that she might know her whole history.

In a moment the heavy burden that had weighed so heavily on her heart was rolled off. Was it possible that she had ever fancied her Lord had forgotten her? The tears stood in her eyes as she thought of it, as though she had judged her dearest friend harshly. Here were His commands; this was where she must go. She was ready; all she had to do was to get to the nearest station, and make her way to Netherton, instead of London, whither she had vaguely intended to travel. The message came not an hour too soon, but not too late.

She gathered a bunch of autumn flowers, to lay on the old Jew's grave as she passed the churchyard on her way to the station. The little mound was already grass-grown, and his body was sleeping beneath it, with his face still turned towards Jerusalem. Carola read her letter there in whispers, as if the deaf ear could perchance catch the answer to the message he had sent. Then she laid her head down for a minute or two on the cool turf, shedding a few tears --- not unhappy ones, though she was going away, and might never see this quiet grave again. Matthias knew now who the Messiah was; he had seen Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

It was evening when she reached a town in the Black Country. For some miles the railway had run through banks of smoking and burning slag, with here and there ponds of stagnant, drossy-looking water, and a few rows of pollard willows standing black and leafless beside them. Blotches of dark-mouthed pits and tall chimneys clamped with iron, and engines with their long cranks continually rising and falling, divided the landscape among them, whilst the setting sun was going down behind a thick canopy of smoke. Large skips ascended out of the pits with heavy loads, amid the clanking of chains and mysterious metallic shrieks, and swung down again with a jarring clang into the deep caverns underground.

"Can you tell me where the hospital is?" asked Carola when the train left her behind at Netherton and the busy porters had time to attend to her.

"Ah, I'll take you there," answered one of them; "I'm always glad of a chance to see Sister Elizabeth. She's been a rare good friend to me, and to most on us. There's a many on us been in the Orspitle for one thing or another."

It was a small, plain, unpretending building, and the room in which Carola waited was bare and unadorned. Through the window she could see an extensive plain, thickly dotted over its whole extent with pits and engine-houses, and chimneys belching out volumes of smoke. It was easy to understand that there would be many accidents there, in that whirl of activity above ground and below. And Carola felt that she was come to take a share in this energetic swing of labour. She had found a home again, a place where she could work as Christ had worked on earth. There was a vast field for ministering to others before her; her passion for loving service would be satisfied here. No more lonely days and dreary desolate thoughts for her. She could not do any great thing, but she could nurse the sick for her Lord's sake.

At last, when the night had fallen, the door opened, and there entered a tall, grave-looking, elderly woman, with clearly-cut features and keen eyes, which surveyed Carola steadfastly. The girl had taken off her bonnet, as if she knew herself already at home, and she met her gaze of scrutiny with an eager, frank simplicity, free from either affectation or embarrassment. But she did not speak until Sister Elizabeth addressed her, with a smile stealing over her grave face.

"I know all about you," she said in a pleasant voice; "your governesses did wisely in sending me your letter, for there will be no feeling of concealment in your mind. And if you are like your letter, I shall find in you one who works for the Lord Jesus Christ, as I wish all about me to do. Are you willing to be only a servant, if I find you fitted for nothing else?"

"I shall be glad to be a servant here," answered Carola. "I'm young and very strong, and I can do anything you set me to do. I want to help to save life, not to destroy it," she said in a low voice as her eyes filled with tears. "You know I once helped to destroy life."

"Yes," said Sister Elizabeth; "but if that dwells in your memory at all, it must only make you more patient and more watchful, if I make you a nurse. They are rough folks, are my poor men and boys, and you must be cheerful among them, and as light-hearted as possible. We must make them happy whilst they are with us, for many of them have hard lives elsewhere. I want no one here who does not work with all their heart and strength for Jesus Christ's sake. You must not come because you are lonely, or sorrowful, or disappointed. Whatsoever you do you must do it to the Lord."

"Oh, that is what I want!" cried Carola eagerly. "I am not poor, you know; I have more money than I need, and you will not have to pay me any wages. If I could be all day long doing what my Lord would have me do! Something like what His mother and His sisters would do. And you make me feel as if you were something like them," she added, looking into Sister Elizabeth's grave and beautiful face with reverential eyes.

"Well, come," she answered with a smile, "I will take you through my wards."

It was a small hospital, with only three wards, containing ten beds each, and these were not all full, as it was set apart for accidents and surgical cases only. With a soft, steady step Carola walked through the long and lofty rooms, glancing with compassion and sympathy on the hard, rough faces, just touched with the refining finger of illness, which were lifted for an instant from the pillows as Sister Elizabeth and she passed by. Yes, here indeed was such work as her heart would delight in; for would not Christ have paced pityingly to and fro among them, perhaps healing one or another with His words or looks? She was glad she had strength to bring to the service of these helpless ones, glad that she could give her health to the ministry of the sick. If her Lord came, and called for her, she would not be ashamed for Him to find her there. And in some respects her early life had fitted her for this work. She had witnessed sickness and suffering under its coarsest and most repulsive aspects in the miserable and crowded dwelling-places of the East-end. There was none of that natural disgust and dismay to overcome which is the first trial of a novice. These men and boys, disfigured and repulsive as some of them were, were as brothers to her --- brothers whom she had known when she was young, and who were now thrown upon her sisterly pity and help. There was nothing she could not do for them, and already her brain was busy devising loving plans for the relief of their sufferings, and the diversion of their thoughts from their sad condition.

When night came she went to her little narrow room, as small and as barely furnished as a cell in a nunnery. The red light of the blazing furnaces fell upon its white walls, and the throbbing and clanging of hammers sounded all around her like the monotonous murmur of the sea beating against a shore. She looked through her little window for a few minutes, with a smile upon her face such as had not been there since she left Hazelmount. She had been tossed upon a sea of troubles, but now she had come to a haven where she could find rest. "This is a place where I should be glad for my Lord to find me when He comes," she said, half aloud, with a sigh of satisfaction.

The cloud that had settled on the Grange at Hazelmount when Carola left it still brooded over it. Philip Arnold had grown gloomy, and almost morose; the boyish tenderness of his manner towards his mother had passed into reserve, and he no longer came in from the farm or the market with a budget of cheery gossip to tell her. He continued always dutiful and gentle to her, with a restrained affection; but there was not the open confidence of former days between them. He could not speak of the one subject closest to his heart. They never mentioned Carola, though they were always thinking of her, and this silence made it difficult to speak freely on any other subject.

They were drifting apart; yet who was to blame? Mrs. Arnold could fully justify her-self --- for what other mother would consent to let her son marry a girl springing from the very dregs of the people? The innate and hereditary vice had passed over Carola wondrously; but who could say it might not come out in her children, and their old family be brought to open and flagrant shame in the next generation? Besides all this, Carola's own name was branded. All the county had heard or read of that terrible trial of Lumley's murderer, in which she had been forced to disclose the degradation of her girlhood. It was possible for a human being to be fit to enter the kingdom of heaven, and yet be unfit to be received into a family like theirs. Mrs. Arnold did not put it to herself in so many words, but there was a dim consciousness that this was the real view of the case. Philip ought to feel that it was a sin to pine after the impossible, and she herself must shake off this dead weight, under which her soul seemed to cleave unto the dust, and be no longer able to lift itself up into such cornmunion with God as it had once enjoyed.

Some months after Philip's vain visit to London, in half-hearted search after Carola, an event took place at Hazelmount which was altogether unexpected. Mrs. Stewart, the absentee owner of Hazelmount Park, died abroad, leaving Hazelmount to her nephew, Captain Bentley, who was an utter stranger to them all. The Hall had been shut up for several years, and Mr. Arnold, as the agent for the estate, had held a position of unusual authority and influence. But now the new landlord came down immediately after his aunt's death and took formal possession, remaining at the Hall, which he quickly filled with a retinue of servants from London; and very soon afterwards he announced to Mr. Arnold his intention of making one of his own people the agent for the estate.

"He's a man with a stubborn will of his own," said Mr. Arnold musingly, after he had told his wife of this fresh arrangement, "and it will lead him into difficulties that be doesn't foresee. He has served all his tenants with notice to quit, --- even me; and there are some that will leave their farms on his hands, and he'll have to take a lower rent for them, and maybe get a set of poor men that will starve the ground. He's as good a set of tenants as any in the county, and his rents are high. Why can't he let well alone?"

"We could never quit our farm," replied Mrs. Arnold.

"Oh, no, no!" he said with a hearty laugh; "it's a mere matter of form. Think of turning Arnold of Hazelmount away! It's only a step towards taking a fresh valuation, and our farm is worth double what it was thirty years ago. But he'll give me nothing to compensate for the time and toil and money I've put into the soil."

"We can afford it?" she asked anxiously.

"Oh, ay!" he answered. "I don't say we can't pay double rent; but there are other tenants that won't, and it will make a difference to the country-side if we get a lot of new neighbours. And it will make it heavier by-and-by for Philip; and who knows what Philip's son may have to pay by the time it comes into his hands?"

"You are looking far ahead," said Philip with a sad smile.

"No farther than my grandfather looked," he continued; "if old families like ours don't look ahead, they must go to the wall sooner or later. It seems to me, when I come across an Arnold in the parish registers three hundred years back, that he must have had some thought of me when he was alive. Ay, and the old fruit-trees in the orchard and the filbert-hedge in the garden were planted by men who knew they were planting them for us, not for themselves. I've grafted many a tree myself, thinking of my grandchildren and their children, God bless them! And I hope you will do the same, Philip, and hand on the old unblemished name; for a 'good name is better than great riches.' I've only one great joy in store for me now, and that's to see your son laid in the old cradle you were rocked in, and me before you. I never knew a joy like that when I saw your little head lying there."

There was great commotion throughout the whole neighbourhood. Those tenants who thought themselves over-rented prepared to quit their farms; but Mr. Arnold did not take much thought of the insecurity of his own position. He could not believe in its being insecure. He was ready to pay a double rent, if it came to that. And when the rent-day came he went down to the inn at the nearest village, where he had been used to receive the rents for Mrs. Stewart, and paid his own to Captain Bentley's new agent.

"You are prepared to give up possession of the Grange next Christmas, Mr. Arnold?" said the agent in a business-like tone.

"Give up the Grange!" he repeated.

"The Grange, to be sure," said the agent.

"Give it up?" he asked in a puzzled tone.

"Yes," answered the agent curtly; "Captain Bentley has another tenant to put in."

"It's a mistake," said Mr. Arnold in a voice which he forced to be steady; "we've been at the Grange these three hundred years; all the country knows it. I am ready to pay any rent Captain Bentley pleases, and there is not a better farmer in the county, though I say it myself."

"You are a tenant farmer?" said the agent.

"To be sure," he replied.

"Then your landlord chooses to do what he likes with his own," he continued, "and he has promised the Grange to an old friend of his, who has been of service to him many a time. He has promised it to me. You will give up possession at Christmas."

"I cannot!" exclaimed Mr. Arnold; "it would kill me. I must see Captain Bentley myself."

"You can see him, of course," replied the agent, "but it will make no difference."

The old farmer turned away, and walked steadily out of the room, and through the assembly of smaller tenants in the adjoining hall, but he could see none of their familiar faces clearly for the mist that was in his eyes. He called sharply to the ostler to bring his horse, and when his old friends asked him if he was not going to stay for the rent-day dinner, at which he had always presided, he made no answer. He did not hear that any one spoke to him. In a stupor of bewilderment he rode slowly homewards, up the steep roads that climbed to the top of Hazelmount. Leave Hazelmount! He could see himself a little lad running at his father's side along this road, and he could see Philip a little lad running at his side. There had never been a time when there had not been an Arnold and his son. He checked his horse at the gate of one, of his large fields, and looked across it till the tears filled his eyes. It did not seem to him that it was he who had sown the corn springing up in those furrows, so much as those forefathers of his. How many seed-times and harvests had found them there ? He could almost see a band of shadowy men passing through the field, each one carrying on the work of the one who had gone before him; so long a line of good men and true, and he was to be the last of them! This was a worse thing to befall them than if Philip had married Carola.

For there was this bitterness in his grief: no one would feel as he did. His wife had not always dwelt in Hazelmount; and once Philip had spoken of a wish to emigrate, if by that means he could marry Carola. The lad loved her better than his forefathers and their old home.

At last he roused himself and went on, turning into the great kitchen when he reached the house, and sitting down, pallid and trembling, in the old chimney corner. His be-dimmed eyes roamed round the place. There was not a crack in the quarried floor or a rafter in the roof that was not familiar to him. Up yonder, swung to the central beam, hung the old oak cradle, with 'God bless thee' carved on the head of it, in which he had hoped to see Philip watching his sleeping son, as he had himself watched Philip in his babyhood. The heavy, well-scoured table at which his workmen ate and drank; the settle where they sat warmly on winter nights; the wide old chimney with a huge fire always roaring in the grate: these things were dearer to him than be knew. He could not leave them.

Mrs. Arnold's indignation and incredulity partly reassured him. It was ridiculous, she urged, that a mere upstart like Captain Bentley could uproot an old family like theirs. The whole country would rise up against such injustice and tyranny, and the force of public resentment would bring him to reason. He would not like to be sent to Coventry by all his fellow-landowners. It could never be that the Arnolds of Hazelmount should be turned off their farm as if they were poverty stricken, unthrifty, or unskilful farmers.

But it was not long before they discovered that Captain Bentley was resolved to have his own way, if it set the whole county against him. The neighbouring gentry and the clergy took up the matter warmly, and representations were made by the most influential persons in the county to the new-comer at Hazelmount of the cruelty and injustice of driving so old a family from their ancient birthplace. Captain Bentley replied that he was not a sentimental man, and he should take his stand on his legal rights. The farm was his, and the Arnolds must go.

The blow fell scarcely less heavily on the village than on the farmstead. The people, too, belonged to the soil; if they quitted it, it would be like uprooting their very lives, yet how could they live and work under a new master? Even the children, from the first dawn of their memory, had been accustomed to toddle up to the farm-house kitchen, for their wages, receiving a penny or two from the hand of either the master or the mistress, and learning to feel that they were born their servants. Old men and women could talk of little else but of bygone Arnolds, who were lying peacefully at rest amid generations of bygone labourers in the parish churchyard; what would become of them when their old master had gone away and a new man ruled in his stead? Hazelmount would be scarcely like a home to them, though their own cottages remained. But who could tell how long these humble homes would be left untouched by change? Mr. Arnold's successor was already known, and disliked. He would probably bring labourers and servants of his own choice; and they also would be turned adrift to seek new dwelling-places on strange lands.

"Father, there is no hope," said Philip, after seeing the Lord-lieutenant of the county, who had made the question a matter of personal favour from Captain Bentley, and had been refused; "we shall have to go."

"Yes," answered the old farmer with bowed head, and in a broken voice.

"Where would you like to go best?" asked Philip.

"I've no care for anything," he replied. "It's no use thinking of an old stump of a tree. Go where you like, Phil, and carry me with you for the little time I shall live."

"I do not wish to be a tenant-farmer again," said Philip, "and there's no land to be bought in England. If you could but make up your mind with me, now we must quit Hazlemount, to go and buy a place for ourselves in America, no landlord could turn us out again. Let us make another Hazelmount altogether our own. There are places as fertile as this and as beautiful as this. You shall found a family instead of being the last of one."

"You mean to marry, then?" said Mr. Arnold, whilst his mother listened anxiously for Philip's answer. She could find him a wife to go out with him --- a daughter-in-law after her own heart --- if he would but make up his mind to marry.

"Yes," said Philip, "if I can find Carola. Don't think I have forgotten her. But you will not be afraid of anybody knowing her history there; and there will be no old house for her happiness and mine to be sacrificed to. Mother, if I cannot marry Carola, I will never marry. She is the only woman I have ever loved, or can love; there is nothing in herself that you can find fault with. Father, you would be glad to see Carol my wife?"

"Ay, my lad!" he answered, "as glad as I could be about anything; but nothing will gladden me again."

"Mother," said Philip in a pleading voice.

"If it must be, it must be," she replied with tears in her eyes; "but, oh! Philip, you might have done so much better! Still, if we leave England, it will not signify so much; and she was a good girl, I own."

It was a grudging consent, yet Philip expected nothing more. His own trouble at leaving Hazelmount had been deep and poignant, but this hope had been lying secretly at the root of it, and now his spirits rose again. The prospect before him brightened. To be himself a landowner, to build a new house altogether his own, and to see a family growing up around him, free and independent of landlords, was a future better in his eyes than the carrying on of the name of Arnold of Hazelmount. But there was very much to be done. At Christmas they must quit the old place, and no arrangements had yet been made. He must start for America immediately, to find a suitable spot for founding their new home, and Carola must be traced, and her consent won. It was not altogether a fresh plan to him, and he had already provided himself with some important information concerning lands in the United States; but he had scarcely hoped to get his parents to agree upon leaving England. Now there was no time to be lost.

The news soon spread through Hazelmount, and all the villagers came up to the great kitchen to ask if it was true, and to talk the matter over with their masters. The last harvest was ready to be gathered in, but he, the last Arnold, would be absent. It seemed impossible that it could be true. The gathering under the old raftered roof was a mournful one; the men looked downcast and sullen, and all the women were weeping. The oldest among them, Jack Windybank's father, an aged man, over eighty years of age, stood in their midst, leaning on a strong and rugged thorn-stick, with his white head shaking and palsied, and with a tear or two slowly stealing down his furrowed face; But he was the first to speak, in a slow and laboured utterance, whilst all the younger folk kept a profound silence.

"Maister," he said,"we've been talkin' over this thing among oursens; and it's a deadly bitter shame. The land's yourn and ourn more than hisn, that has niver done a day's work for it or on it. There's niver been a time, maybe from the Creation, when there wasn't Arnolds o' Hazelmount; ay! and Windybanks, and Foxes, and Cartwrights, and the whole lot on us; and there niver were a Bentley afore, and he con turn us out wi' a word. I conna' say, 'God bless him!'"

"No, no!" cried all the men; "it's the contrary o' that."

"But they dunna' want to turn we labourers out," continued the old man; "no, no! there's work as we can do, and we know the lie o' the land, and all about the crops it 'ill bear best, and they'd keep we on a bit to serve their turn. But a new maister 'udn't suit us; and what we've got to say, me and all the men, ay! and all the women, too: If Arnolds o' Hazelmount go, we go. Choose all as are any good to yo', maister, and they're ready to pack off and go away with yo'. Maister Philip says as he'll make a new Hazelmount in Ameriky; but there couldn't be no real Hazelmount wi'out Windybanks, mid Foxes, and Cartwrights, and the rest on us."

Mr. Arnold had buried his face in his hands, as if he could not look at his old work-people, but Philip answered the palsied old man.

"But, Richard," he said kindly, "it would never do for you to try to go so far away from home."

"Ay, ay!" he interrupted, "I'm too far on i' years; but niver yo' think on me, Maister Philip. It conna' be long afore I find my lodgin' in the grave; and I'll just wait about here till the time comes. And if Captain Bentley drives me away from Hazelmount, anyhow, there's the workhouse, and they're bound to find me shelter there. But my son Jack and his wife and family's ready to go wi' yo'. And we're all o' one mind. Yo' conna' make a real Hazelmount wi'out us; but, Lord love yo', if we Windybanks, and Foxes, and Cartwrigbts, and the rest on us go along with yo', the old maister 'ill soon feel himself at home out yonder."

Old Richard Windybank came to a sudden pause, for the sound of his master's heavy sobs broke in upon his speech. For some moments there was no other sound to be heard; but when Mrs. Arnold laid her arm fondly on her husband's bowed neck there burst a storm of weeping and lamenting such as Hazelmount had never known before. There had been sorrow and grief caused by the death of many an Arnold, but, however well-beloved these had been, there had always been an Arnold to fill the vacant place. But this calamity was about to depopulate the village; half the homes would be forsaken for ever, and the ancient circle of neighbourhood and friendship was about to be broken up. Those who went away must leave many a friend behind them, and those who stayed must lose more than half of what made life happy for them. It was an undreamed-of, an unmeasured catastrophe.

"You must not decide, any of you," said Philip, after a while, in a faltering voice; "not until I am in America. I am going there at once to seek a place, and I'll send you word faithfully what your chances will be, and what profit or loss it would be to you all; and, then, if you will come with us, why, it will make it like a real home to us, my father and mother and me; and we will do our best for you all; and it shall never be forgotten that you left England for our sakes. But leave us now, for my father cannot speak a word to you."

Slowly the people took their departure, shaking their heads sadly as they spoke of their old master.

"He's breakin' his heart," said old Richard Windybank, "and nought as we con do 'ill mend it. Mark my words, he wunna' live to quit Hazelmount; and we'll lay him wi' his forefathers. But Maister Philip, he's got all his wits about him, and a high spirit he has."

So Philip went his way just before the in-gathering of the harvest began; but he could not start for America until he had made some inquiries after Carola. He had always reckoned upon being able to find her through the address given at the Bank of England when she applied for the interest of her money in the Consols, and he made application through a solicitor in London for this address. But the reply was that no dividend had been claimed for the last year and a half, and that the old address of Matthias Levi still stood on the books. There was no time for him to pursue his search personally; and with a heavy heart, and with his hopes cast down, Philip set out in quest of a new Hazelmount on the other side of the Atlantic; for what would a new home be to him, even if it was absolutely his own land, if Carola did not share it?

Carola had been a year in the hospital, but she had not kept count of the weeks and months. The seasons made but little difference in the landscape surrounding it, except in the length of the days and nights; yet she had not missed very much their pleasant changes. All her time was so much occupied, and her hands were so full of work, that she had no thought to give to other things. She had not taken the trouble to apply for her little income, for all her wants were supplied, and she had no leisure to spend upon herself. For the first month she had worked as a servant merely, cooking, or scrubbing floors, or washing linen, as Sister Elizabeth ordered her. But before long she was employed as a nurse, and displayed so much ready tact, and patience, and trustworthness, that she soon found her-self on constant duty in the wards. Next to teaching children this was a work she would have chosen for herself; yet now and then her spirit fainted a little within her, for she saw only the sorrow and suffering there is in life. It was a surgical hospital, and most of the patients who came in were working men who had met with accidents in the pits or at the furnaces; and many a sad sight she had to witness without yielding to any outward expression of her natural tenderness. Yet before many months were over, if Sister. Elizabeth could not be present at any operation, it was Carola, with her steady nerves, and strong, gentle touch, and watchful eye, whose help was called for, both by the surgeons and the patients.

The evening was the time Carola loved most, when the patients had had their tea and the wards were quietly gliding into the stillness of night. She could then sing or read aloud to the poor sufferers, until some of them fell asleep, and the rest were soothed into patient endurance of their pains. She was pacing to and fro one night, carrying in her arms a little child who had been badly burnt, when Sister Elizabeth softly opened the door. The lights had been turned low, and, the fire was a heap of glowing embers only, and Carola was passing slowly down the ward, followed by the peaceful and wistful eyes of the patients lying on the beds, for she was singing in a low clear tone, and they joined their feeble and quavering voices with hers. She had sung the same verse two or three times ---

"It will be a hard thing for the men to spare her, even for a few days," thought Sister Elizabeth. But she called Carola away, and sent in the night-nurse. A telegram had come from a friend of hers, a doctor in a country place forty miles away, begging her to send him the best nurse she had by the next train. There was not much time for preparation, and Carola had to hasten.

It was a small and lonely station, lit up by a flickering oil lamp, and the train only dropped a slip coach there as it whirled on through the night. There was no one on the platform but the station-master and the doctor, who was waiting anxiously for her arrival, and who hurried her into his carriage and ordered his coachman to go on as quickly as he could. It was a drive of more than an hour, during which the doctor was reading by the light of a carriage-lamp; and it was not until they passed through some lodge-gates that he addressed her.

"Are you used to the sight of frightful accidents?" he asked.

"We have bad ones at Netherton Hospital, sir," she answered.

"I want a nurse who will be obedient and watchful," he went on; "this patient of mine was shot yesterday, accidentally of course, and it will depend upon you as much as upon me whether we can pull him through. I suppose Sister Elizabeth has confidence in you?"

"I have been with her since last September," Carola replied. "I will be obedient and watchful. I think you may trust in me, sir."

"Good!" he said, turning again to his book, until they reached the door of a hall, in which a single light was burning. Carola followed the doctor through long and silent passages to a room but dimly lighted. A woman, who was evidently only a housekeeper, welcomed her appearance warmly, and led her to the side of the bed on which the patient was lying.

It was a long and anxious night. The doctor lay down in the adjoining room, ready to be called at a moment's notice, and the housekeeper soon fell asleep in an easy-chair. But it was Carola's duty to sit beside the bed, with her eyes fastened on the half-concealed face of the stranger, sunk in stupor, and possibly passing away into death. It was the first time she had been called away from her tranquil home in the hospital, and she was excited, There was no fear of any drowsiness coming over her; this one thing she had to do --- to see that no change took place in the patient she was watching, that he made no movement which might disturb the bandages about his head. This great and silent house in which she was must be somewhere in the very heart of the country, for they had passed through no town and only one small village on their way to it. She knew nothing, not even the name of this apparently dying man, whose life seemed to hang upon her watchfulness and care. The room was large and lofty and handsomely furnished: he must be a rich man, but there was not a friend or relative near him. There was no face looking in, silently and anxiously, from time to time, as if any one cared whether he lived or died.

The dawning of the day was scarcely perceptible through the thick curtains, and it was broad sunlight before the doctor set her free from her post, and bade her get the rest she needed before being called upon to watch again. The housekeeper led her to a room near at hand, and as soon as she was left alone Carola drew aside the curtain to look out on the freshness of the early morning But what familiar landscape was this that stretched far and wide before her? Was she back in her little cottage at Hazelmount? for there lay the great plain sloping up to the distant horizon, with its clusters of trees all touched with autumn tints, and its yellow cornfields just ripe for the harvest, as they had been three years ago. Three years ago? Nay, three centuries of years. Could this indeed be Hazelmount? She opened the window, and, leaning through, looked across, the hazy park. Yonder was the path leading across it to the school-house: and there was the school-house itself, and the empty rick-yard behind it, and beyond that the ivy-clad gable of the Grange. Yes; she had been brought back to Hazelmount.

All that lost and happy past rushed back upon her like a flood. Oh! how she had loved them all! What a real home she had found there! She saw, as if a flash of lightning glanced across the future, that the hospital could never be as full and true a home, with the patients dwelling only a little while under her care, and then making way in endless succession to fresh cases. Her heart yearned towards the peaceful little village with the longing of home-sickness. Yet they must not discover that she was here, so near to them; for, now she knew a little more of the world, she felt that they had acted according to its dictates in considering her unworthy of a place in their midst.

This house, then, must be Hazelmount Hall, which had been closed for years; and probably there would be no one in it who would recognise her in her nurse's cap and uniform. But it would not be right to quit her post because there was the risk of being known. Sister Elizabeth confided the most dangerous cases to her care, and this stranger was committed to her charge as a trained nurse. Ought she to leave him because she was afraid of meeting again those who had despised and rejected her?

Carola shed a few tears, very sorrowful ones. But tears were a luxury not permitted in the narrow path of duty. It was right now that she should sleep, and recruit the strength she had devoted to the service of the feeble. She whispered to herself the Lord's Prayer, for these were the very words her Lord had bidden her to say; and when she was too weary or too troubled to utter any other she could remember them. In a few minutes she was sleeping a tranquil and unbroken sleep.

It was evening when she resumed her post at Captain Bentley's side. There was still danger, but it was less imminent, and the doctor told her she might allow him to talk a little if he seemed inclined. For some hours she sat reading beside a shaded lamp, glancing often at her patient, with her ear intent for any stir or whisper. Towards midnight he made an effort to move, and she was beside him instantly.

"Is the danger past?" he whispered.

"Almost," she answered; "you have only to keep quite quiet, and trust in me. The doctor is still in the house, and if there is any need I will call him."

"Shall I be blind?" he asked.

"We cannot tell yet," she replied, "but I have seen many men far worse injured than you are get well, and go to work again. You might have been killed on the spot; and now the danger is nearly over."

"I'd almost sooner have died than be maimed and blind," he said; "and yet perhaps it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion, as they say. Is that true?"

"I don't know," she replied, "but for myself, I know that if I live I live unto the Lord, and if I die I die unto the Lord; living or dying, I am the Lord's."

There was a ring of gladness in her voice which made it pleasant to his ear, but her words sounded to him almost like a foreign language. He lay quite still after the effort of speaking; but he was conscious that she did not move away, that she stood near him ready to perform any service; and there was a feeling of security in being thus carefully watched. If anything went wrong, this quiet, silvery tongued nurse would see it at once. His brain was clear now, and he could recall his accident, and all that passed before it. But was it an accident? There was enough hatred of him, hatred kindled altogether by himself, to make it not impossible that he had been shot at. He thought of the families about to quit their homes and emigrate to strange lands, who felt that it was he who was driving them away. He had been a hard, selfish, and tyrannical landlord, and no wonder if one of them had shot him from behind a hedge.

"Do you know how it happened?" he inquired, after so long a pause that Carola thought he had fallen asleep again.

"You were out shooting in the Long Coppice," she answered, speaking very deliberately, "and you were crushing through the underwood with your gun loaded, and a branch caught the trigger. There was no one with you but Tudor, the gamekeeper."

"Do you think anybody out of Hazelmount would do it?" he asked.

"Oh, no, no! that is impossible," she answered.

"They hate me," he muttered.

"Why?"

"I've turned the Arnolds out of their old farm," he said, in troubled accents, "and half the villagers are leaving with them. Young Arnold is gone to America to buy a place there. Oh, they hate me bitterly enough."

Carola listened with passionate astonishment. The Arnolds leaving the Grange! the place which seemed as if it belonged to them by right! What right could this stranger have, a man unknown to all of them, to drive them away from the home that had belonged to them from time immemorial? Oh, the pain and the heart-breaking misery of it! And she could do nothing. For first always in the movements of her eager heart came the instinct of helping; and if that was unsatisfied, as it must be now, her own pain was great. She would need no book to keep her awake to-night; her brain was too full of thoughts for reading.

"Who are you?" inquired Captain Bentley at last. "I do not know your voice."

"I am a nurse from Netherton Hospital," she answered, "and there they call me Sister. But they are all poor people, and you had better call me nurse."

For in the bitterness of her resentment she did not wish to hear him call her by so dear a name. He was doing evil to those she loved, and how could she look upon him, as she had trained herself to look upon the wounded work-people brought to her from their dangerous occupations, as brothers injured in the battle of life?

"I had a sister once," he said sadly; "she was the last creature who cared a straw for me."

How desolate the words sounded! Carola looked down on him with pitying eyes, for the thought of the dreary future which lay before him passed vividly through her mind. If he indeed recovered it would be as a maimed and disfigured man, almost blind, from whom all the pride of life had departed. If he had secured no one's love in the past, there was little hope for the time to come. Her heart melted in pity towards him.

"I care for you," she said, "and I am nursing you as carefully as a sister could."

"But you are paid for it," he replied.

"Not as you think," she answered; "I shall have none of the money you pay to the hospital. But of course He who sent me will pay me."

"That is what I said," he muttered; "that makes all the difference."

"But you do not understand," she said in a joyous tone; "He who sent me to you is my Lord Jesus Christ."

It was a long time since that name had fallen upon his ear; so long that he had to go back to his boyhood and childhood for memories of it. He had heard it chiefly at Christmas and Easter; and the recollection of holidays was principally associated with it. They were pleasant times those holidays, when he had gone home from school, and played with his little sister, and been indulged by his mother. His thoughts wandered away among silent memories until he fell asleep again; and Carola stole noiselessly back to her seat, but not to read. Her heart was too full of trouble.

During the days that followed there was no difficulty for Carola in keeping her presence unknown to the villagers of Hazelmount. It was her duty to watch Captain Bentley through the night, and most of the day she spent in rest for herself. Presently he demanded more companionship from her, for her voice was always soothing to him during the dreary hours he lay awake, fretted by the long inaction. It happened one night that she began to talk of old Matthias Levi, the Jew cobbler, and she drew a picture of him and his little shop with a vividness that brought the whole scene clearly to his mind. Her own mind was dwelling fully on those early days, and Matthias seemed to stand before her in a clearer and brighter light than he had ever done before.

"Why, I know him better now than I did then!" she cried; "I can see him now, and what he was trying to do. 'For what doth God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?' That is what Matthias was doing."

"It is impossible," murmured Captain Bentley.

"But he did it," she said; "not perfectly, of course, but to the utmost of his power. Yes, he did justly, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with his God."

He could hear her voice trembling, and he knew she could say no more to him just now. For the last week or two he had been seeing through her eyes, and thinking with her brain; and all life wore a different aspect, for him. Her mind had gained so dominant an influence over him that they were pondering over the same subject, with a subtle feeling that it was so, though no word was spoken. They were both thinking of that flagrant act of injustice and tyranny lying at his very gates, and he was contrasting his own life painfully with that of the humble and poverty-stricken Jew. At last he called softly to Carola.

"Sister," he said, "do you know that at first I thought I had been shot for revenge?"

"Yes," she answered; "but that is impossible."

"I should have deserved it," he went on, "for I am driving away people who have lived on these lands hundreds of years. The estate came to me, and I thought I'd a right to do what I pleased with my own; and I have been guilty of an unjust and unmerciful deed. I was lifting up myself proudly against God. I thank God you have told me of that old Jew to-night."

"Why?" she asked, with almost breathless eagerness.

"Because it is not yet too late to repent," he answered; "it is still two months to Christmas, and I can change all that. No; I would sooner quit Hazelmount myself than drive them away. The place is more theirs than mine."

"You make me happier than. I can tell," sobbed Carola.

"Do I?" he asked; "then if it were for nothing else, the thing should be done."

The next afternoon, when Carola awoke and opened her window, she heard a merry peal of bells ringing across the Park from the unseen church tower, and she knew that the glad tidings had already reached the people of Hazelmount. She leaned through the window and looked towards the Grange, which was now hidden from her by the brown stacks that began to fill the rick-yard. But how well could she picture it --- the joyous meeting in the great kitchen, and the tall, strong old master standing in the midst of his work-people, and telling them there were to be no sorrowful separations, and no heart-breaking departures! They were saved from their overwhelming trouble. Yet her eyes filled with tears, and her heart felt heavy, as she, thought how soon she would be going away, even though she was about to return to her work in the hospital, with the dear companionship of Sister Elizabeth.

Philip Arnold was wandering about the United States, seeking for his new Hazelmount. A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, for he had to consider the needs of a small colony rather than that of a mere family. There was no lack of money to buy such a place as he wanted, for the industry and thrift of many a generation had placed him beyond the reach of mere pecuniary difficulties. Yet his heart was sore at being driven from his fatherland; and as the hope of finding Carola died away there seemed nothing in the new country with which he could content himself. For who could seek her with the perseverance he would have if he was in England? Yet if this tribe of emigrants came out under his care, and looking to him as their head, how could he desert them in order to find her? It must be years before he could leave the new settlement to return to England for this purpose.

But a telegram reached him in the midst of his heavy-hearted inquiries. "Come home," it said; "we are not leaving Hazelmount." He had plenty of time to meditate over the mystery of this message on his voyage homeward. He had himself been privately to Captain Bentley, imploring him to leave his father undisturbed until his death, and offering to pay a large sum for this favour. What had brought about the change he could not guess, but it was not unmingled exultation to be going back to Hazelmount, for he feared his parents' reluctant consent to receive Carola as his wife would be recalled. He had no strong hope of finding her unchanged towards him, but he could not relinquish what he had. The dreary blank of the last two years seemed about to fall upon his life again.

Yet, in spite of all, there was a great gladness in treading the old road again between the station and Hazelmount. No place he had seen had looked so beautiful in his eyes. He stood a few minutes at the edge of the fir-coppice gazing at the many-gabled half-timber farm-house which had. been the permanent abiding-place of his family. It was well for him, as well as for his parents, not to be ruthlessly driven away from it with anger and resentment in his heart.

The routine of the farm was going on as usual. The threshing-machine was humming amid the brown stacks, and the cows were marching up slowly from the meadows to their stalls. He could see the well-known figures of his men moving about the fold, and wondered that there was no change in them. It might have been years that he had been absent, but it was only three months. His mother was not aged in the least, and his father had recovered all his former vigour and spirit. Philip felt as if it was he who had changed, whilst every one else had come to a standstill.

"We shall never be disturbed again!" exclaimed his father triumphantly. "The Captain promises me a lease for three lives --- mine, and yours, and your son's. it has given me back my life, Phil; I feel as if I was forty again."

"Tell me how it came about," said Philip.

It was a long story as Mr. Arnold told it, for his joy made him fluent, and Philip's long absence had given time for many things to happen. And Mrs. Arnold had interruptions and explanations to make, without which she thought he could not understand the current of events.

"It was the nurse who brought him to repentance," she said. "Captain Bentley maintains so himself."

"Did you see her?" asked Philip.

"No, not exactly," answered his father "I caught sight of her early one morning, standing at the gate by the school-house, dressed in a brown cloak and a poke bonnet, such as nurses mostly wear; and I was hurrying up to speak to her, when she turned away all of a sudden and ran back to the Hall like a lapwing. But I tell you what, my boy: we will give that hospital such a Christmas treat as it never had yet: and we'll send the nurse the handsomest gold watch and chain as a nurse ever had. Ay! and this shall, be a home for her as often as she likes to come to it. The Captain"s set upon doing something for her, and he wouldn't have let her go, only when the danger was over she was ordered back to the hospital."

So it came to pass that, three days before Christmas, Philip Arnold rang at the door of Netherton Hospital, with a porter wheeling a truck well laden with farm-house dainties. It was growing dusk, and the little room into which he was shown, after asking for the nurse who had been to Hazelmount Hall, was not lighted up in any way but by the red glare of the furnace fires. The strange landscape outside and the softened din of the busy toil going on had so arrested his attention that he did not catch the click of the lock as the door opened quietly, and suddenly there fell upon his ears the tones of the dearest voice in the world.

"I am Sister Carol; you were asking for me?"

He could neither speak nor move, for the shock of finding her so strangely, at a moment when she was least in his thoughts, seemed to paralyse him. She did not know him, for after she had waited a few seconds for his answer she spoke again.

"You want me?" she said. "are you hurt, or have you come to fetch me to some one else?"

"Carola!" he cried

"Philip!"

She said no more, but she stretched out her hands to him with a gesture as frank and tender as if the last two years had been nothing but a dream. And he drew her into his arms, and kissed her as fondly as though no one in the world could blame him for loving her.

"But no," she said, drawing herself away from him, "we love one another, Philip: that is true. But we must be content to be friends only."

"Friends!" he repeated, interrupting her: "yes, such friends as husband and wife are. I will never let you go again, not if they closed their doors against me. And do you think any one will say a word now you have saved us all from banishment? For it was you, Carol; but for you we should have left Hazelmount by this time. This Christmas would have been a most miserable time for all of us, and it is you who have saved us. I never thought it was you."

"But you do not think, you do not remember," she said falteringly: "you never knew ---"

"I do know; I know all," he went on; "I was at the trial, and I went to seek you in your old Jew's house. Oh, my darling! what does it matter to me where you were born, or where you lived? I know no one as good as you. There's no one else in the whole world who can make me as good a man and as true a Christian as you will."

"But now," she said, with downcast eyes, "I am working for my Lord here."

"Oh, Carol!" he cried, "don"t make me believe that Christ came to weaken human ties or to set at nought human affections. It is good to have hospitals, but it is better" to have homes; and you will be a happier and better woman as my wife than as a nurse here. If I am ready to leave father and mother and house for your sake, cannot you give up this? Did not our Lord say, 'What God hath joined together let not man put asunder?' You never had a home, and you do not know how sacred and holy it can be."

"But I shall bring disgrace upon you," she answered, still standing aloof from him, and not raising her eyes from the ground.

"Is there nothing of false shame in you, my Carola?" he said; "are you not too much ashamed of that early life, which was no fault of yours? If God Himself placed you there, ought you to think so much of it? Should it weigh so heavily against my love?"

"Oh, if I only knew what I ought to do!" she cried.

"There are plenty of women who can be nurses here," he continued; "but there is no other woman who can be my wife. That is more certain now than it was when we parted two years ago. If you choose to sacrifice yourself, you sacrifice me also. You cannot decide to stay here without dooming me to a sad and solitary life."

"I could never bring myself to do that, she whispered.

"Take your father and mother by surprise," said Sister Elizabeth, when Philip told her his position; "tell them you have invited Captain Bentley's nurse to spend Christmas with them, and my little girl shall come down on Christmas Eve. I've always expected something like this to happen. We could not keep a girl like Carola to grow old in the hospital."

"They cannot refuse me now," he answered.

"Oh," she said, laughing merrily, "they will be so amazed they will not know what to say, and in a few minutes it will all be over."

No news could have been more welcome to Philip's father and mother; but it was difficult for him to keep his secret. The gladness of his heart could not but disclose itself, and he went about the old house as if he had been a boy again. Mrs. Arnold had not seen him so happy since Carola had gone away, and her thoughts turned a good deal to her as she prepared the best bedroom for the nurse from the hospital. Though it was a good thing that at last Philip was recovering his spirits, she could not but feel a sad interest in the poor girl, and if he would but marry, how gladly would she befriend her.

It was well known throughout Hazelmount who was expected at the Grange, and Captain Bentley proposed driving down to await her arrival there on Christmas Eve. There had been some talk of putting up a triumphal arch at the entrance to the village; but Philip discouraged it, and the fact that it was not a time for flowers was against it. But the desire to see and welcome the Hospital Sister who had been the happy agent of their deliverance from exile was strong in every heart, and when Philip passed through the village on his way to the station the women and children ran to the cottage doors and looked after him as long as he was in sight.

They drove home together in the gig, side by side, close to one another, as they would often do in time to come. There was no possibility of being interrupted or overheard, yet they did not say much to one another. Philip could see that her colour came and went under her brown bonnet, and that the smile which had shone in her dark eyes died away as they drew near his home. Her hands were trembling, not with cold; nor was he himself without apprehension. All the proud boasts of the unblemished name of the Arnolds rushed back to his memory as the horse slowly mounted the steep roads. They had sunk deep into his own heart; but he knew they were far deeper in his father's and mother's. And the villagers themselves were full of pride in the old fame of their masters. Even yet there might be sore trouble in store for him.

The first cottage gate was thronged; there stood old Richard Windybank, with his son, John Windybank, and his grandchildren, waiting to welcome the Captain's nurse. Carol's bonnet had fallen back a little, and she leaned forward to them with a wistful, timid look upon her face. For a moment they hesitated, and gazed again, and then they set up a cheer, which echoed with noisy gladness along the village street.

"Why, it's our schoolmistress!" they shouted to one another.

Up at the Grange they heard the running salute of hurrahs which followed Carola through the village, and Mr. and Mrs. Arnold, leaving Captain Bentley in the oak-parlour, went out to meet their guest. Mr. Arnold hastened out bare-headed to the gate, whilst his wife stood waiting under the porch. Philip's face was pale and anxious as he sprang down to lift Carola out of the gig, and at that moment his father, looking up into the sweet wistful face, saw who she was.

"Carol!" he cried, opening his arms to her; and she laid her head down upon his breast as if she was some prodigal child coming home repentant, whilst the old man, bending his head upon hers, burst into a passion of happy tears.

"Father," said Philip eagerly, "she is to be your daughter."

"Ay, ay!" he sobbed; "God bless her!"

"She's saved me from a broken heart. I thought it was a stranger did it, and it was the dear maid I've loved all along."

"Loved me all along!" repeated Carola, lifting up her head and looking into his face.

"Yes, in spite of myself and my forefathers," he said, half carrying her along the causeway of smooth pebbles to the porch, where Mrs. Arnold was standing in much amazement at the greeting he had given to this stranger, though she knew he had been in a state of grateful excitement all day. He pushed back the bonnet from Carola's face and put his arm round her as he stood before his wife.

"Anne, my dear," he said in a broken voice, "it's Carol that has saved us, our daughter that is to be, that must be. Oh, my dear, think of how you and me have loved one another all these years, and let us be happy. They'll forgive us, them that are gone, for we should have lost the old home if it hadn't been for her."

The appeal came suddenly upon her; yet she felt as if she had been gradually preparing for it. All the day her thoughts had been busy with Carola, and there had been a secret yearning after her in her heart. Since she had been so near losing, not only the old home, but the husband who had made it so dear a home to her, and whose heart had been almost broken, she had learned how much too strong a hold the world and its principles bad upon her. She called herself a Christian --- nay, she was a Christian; yet when Christ had sent to her one of His disciples she had shut her heart against her, because she came with no credentials from the world. Her eyes were open at last. She bad been striving to serve God and mammon; she had vainly tried to link the love of the Father with the love of the world.

It was but for a few seconds that she stood motionless whilst these thoughts flashed through her mind, and Carola's timid eyes anxiously and silently watched her. Then she took the girl's face between her hands and kissed her with solemn tenderness.

"I will make it up to you, Carola," she said; "I will atone for it all."

But what she had to atone for she could not have told if there had been time to tell it; for Philip hurried Carola away into the oak-parlour, where Captain Bentley was sitting by the fire, listening intently for her voice. His disfigured face and half-blinded eyes were turned eagerly towards the door, and as she entered he sprang to his feet.

"You are come at last, then," he said; "I have been very weary without you. Sit down here beside me, and tell me what you have been doing, and if Sister Elizabeth will consent to give you up. And tell me if I have done what pleases you, and what you think I ought to do, my little conscience-keeper. For she is the keeper of my conscience, Arnold."

"And of mine," said Philip exultantly.

"Ah!" breathed Captain Bentley, with a half-sigh.

"This nurse of yours, Captain," said Mr. Arnold, "was schoolmistress here two years ago, and she promised herself to Philip as his wife. We claim her promise now, and they'll be married as soon as possible, for there is nothing to put it off for that I can see."

"That is the best news you could tell me, Mr. Arnold," he answered, after a slight pause.

"I shall have her always near to me, and you know what a poor wretch I am, and must be, with one eye gone, and the sight of the other quickly going. It will be a God-send to me to have friends like her and Philip. You'll be my friend, Philip?"

"Yes," he said, warmly clasping his outstretched hand.

"And come and live in the chaplain's cottage," he went on, "for when l am stone-blind I could find my way there. I will set about putting it in order immediately. All that must be left to me. It is twenty years since I lost my sister, and I feel at times as if God in His mercy had sent her back to me."

It seemed to Carola and to Philip as if this Christmas Eve was linked so closely to that happy one two years ago that they might have made but one day. Yet there was a difference; a consciousness of a dark and sorrowful night, which had lasted long, and had threatened to last for ever, lay between them. It made the joy of this latter Christmas greater, though more solemn, than the former.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, when most of the farm people were taking holiday at home, Philip asked Carola to go again with him to the distant fields, to count the flock, and look after the cattle. They trod the same narrow paths, footworn by many generations, and he helped her over rough stiles that had kept their places for a century or two, as they had done two years ago. In the grey sky the December sun was shining coldly, and icicles hung from the roofs of the sheds, and the well-known landscape lay under a wintry haze. He knew that all the wealth of long association and the blessedness of keeping his old home had been well-nigh lost, and that but for Carola he and those belonging to him would have been homeless this Christmas Day. It was she who had brought peace on earth, and good-will towards men for Hazelmount: and every voice had welcomed her, and every heart blessed her. There was more gladness this day in every little homestead than there had ever been before, for the thought of that desolation, and loss, and separation, which they bad just missed They stood again on the brow of the hill, looking down on the floating columns of wood-smoke rising from the cottage hearths, and at the ivied gables of his own home.

"Oh, my darling!" he said abruptly, "have you forgiven me? Have you altogether forgiven me?"

"I never thought I had anything to forgive," she answered, with tears standing in her eyes; "but I hardly understood why you left me, till I saw my old home again, and the people I had lived with. That was a terrible thing even to me; and it was no wonder you could not take a wife out of such a place. And yet --- yet if my Lord placed me there, and chose that for my home, what could I do? I could not think He had done a wrong thing. And He had placed. Matthias beside me to guard and teach me. If it had not been for Matthias, I should have been like those other girls. Oh, Philip! I never thought any of you needed my forgiveness; only I needed your friendship so sorely."

"Ay! that was it," he said; "we forsook you as if you were unworthy."

It was a sting to him in the midst of his happiness; and more or less the memory of it would dwell with him all his life. They had deserted her when her need was sorest, when the battle of her life was the fiercest. She had been alone when he ought to have been beside her. In their selfish fear for their own fair fame they had left her to bear shame and suffering in dreary loneliness. In a measure, he had copied the cowardice and treachery of, the disciples when they forsook their Master and fled. No one had stood by her but Matthias, the feeble old Jew, who knew nothing of her Lord.

"You love me, Carola?" he asked, so doubtful of himself that he was a little doubtful of her.

"I love you better than life!" she answered, pressing closer to his side, as if she felt his doubt. "I love you as my own soul. Yet if Christ called me away from you, I would go, and I would try to be glad to do His will."

"All through, ever since I knew of Him, there has been in my heart, under all troubles, the peace which He left with us, the peace He gives to us. I have not been afraid, and my life has not been altogether troubled."

They walked homeward through the quickly gathering gloom, and went in through the fold-yard gate to enter the house by the great kitchen. A huge fire was blazing on the hearth, and Mr. Arnold was sitting in the chimney-corner smoking his pipe, and he made room for Carola, and put his arm fondly about her. It seemed as if the past had come back again in perfect repetition. But there was no fear now for the future, no deep valley of humiliation to pass through. There might be sorrow for them, but there would be no more separation, except that brief one, when one goes before another, through the silent gates of death, into the Father's house, where Christ Himself is preparing a place for us.