Chapter XIV

"ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING."

Antonia spent the next morning, from twelve to two, in the cottage parlour at Sheen, where Stobart spread out his reports and calculations before her, showed her what he had done in the district John Wesley had allotted to him, and how much—how infinitely more than had been done—there remained to do!

"My own means are so narrow that I can give but little temporal help," he said. "I have to stand by with empty pockets and see suffering that a few shillings could relieve. I have even thought of appealing to my mother—who has not used me well—but she was married six months ago to an old admirer, Sir David Lanigan, an Irish soldier, and a fierce High Churchman, who hates the Wesleys; so I doubt 'twould be wasted humiliation to ask her for aid. I have not scrupled to beg of my rich friends, and have raised money to apprentice at least fifty lads who were in the way to become thieves and reprobates. I have ministered to the two ends of life—to childhood and old age. The middle period must fight for itself."

He read his notes of various hard cases. He had jotted down stern facts with a stern brevity; but the pathos in the facts themselves brought tears to Antonia's eyes more than once in the course of his reading. He showed her what good might be done by a few shillings a week to this family, in which there was a bedridden son—and to another where there was a consumptive daughter; how there was a little lad starving in the gutter who could be billeted upon a hard-working honest family—how for the cost of a room with fire and candle, and sixpence a day for a nurse, he could provide a nursery where the infants of the women-toilers could be kept during the day.

"I have heard of some nuns at Avignon who set up such a room for the women workers in the vineyards," he said. "I think they called it a crêche."

Mrs. Stobart sat by the window busy with her plain sewing, of which she had always enough to fill every leisure hour. She looked up now and then and listened, with a mild interest in her husband's work; but she was just a little tired of it, and the fervid enthusiasm of the time of her conversion seemed very far away. Staffordshire tea-things and copper tea-kettle, brass fender and mahogany bureau filled so large a place in her thoughts, after her husband and son, both of whom she loved with her utmost power of loving, which was not of a high order. She crept away at one o'clock to see her baby George eat his dinner. He was old enough to sit up in his high mahogany chair and feed himself, with many skirmishing movements of his spoon, which he brandished between the slow mouthfuls as if it were a tomahawk.

George and Antonia were so absorbed in their work that Mrs. Stobart had been gone nearly an hour before either of them knew she was absent. The maid came blundering in with a tray as the clock struck two, and began to lay the cloth. Antonia rose to take leave, and insisted on going at once. Her carriage had been waiting half an hour in a drizzling November rain. She left quickly, but not before she had seen that Mr. Stobart's dinner consisted of the somewhat scrimped remains of a shoulder of mutton, and a dish of potatoes boiled in their skins.

She knew some of the officers in his late regiment, and knew how they lived; and it shocked her a little to recall that squalid meal when she sat down at four o'clock, with a party of friends, at a table loaded with an extravagant profusion of the richest food her cook's inventive powers could bring together. She had seen the expensive French chef standing before her with pencil and bill of fare, racking his brains to devise something novel and costly.

That morning at Sheen was the beginning of a close alliance in the cause of charity between Mr. Stobart and Lady Kilrush. They were partners in a business of good works; and all questions of creed were for the most part ignored between them. He would have gladly spoken words in season, but she had a way of putting him off, and she had become to him so beneficent and divine a creature that it was difficult for him to remember that she was not a Christian.

The five thousand a year which she had so freely offered him for his own use she now set aside for his poor.

"I can spare as much," she said, "and yet be a fine lady. Some day, perhaps, when I am old and withered, like the hags that haunt Ranelagh, I may grow tired of finery; and then the poor shall have nearly all my money, and I will live as you do, in a cottage, at ten pounds a year, on a bone of cold mutton and a potato. But while I am young I doubt I shall go on caring for trumpery things. It is such a pleasant change, when I have been in one of your loathsome alleys, to find myself at Leicester House with the princess and her party of wits and savants, or at Carlisle House, dancing in a chain of dukes and duchesses, with a German Royal Highness for my partner."

The responsibilities that went with the administration of so large a fund made a change in George Stobart's life. His residence at Sheen had long been inconvenient, the journey to and fro wasting time for which he had better uses. Lucy loved her rustic home and garden in summer; but she was one of those people who love the country when the sun shines and the roses are in bloom. In the damp autumnal afternoons, when silvery mists veiled the common, her spirits sank, and she began to grow fretful at her husband's absence, and to reproach him if he were late in coming home.

He wanted his wife to be happy, and he wanted to be near the scene of his labours, and within half an hour's walk of St. James's Square. After a careful search he found a house on the south side of the Thames, a quarter of a mile from Westminster Bridge, in Crown Place, a modest terrace facing the river. The house was roomier and more convenient than his rustic cottage; but the long strip of garden between low walls was a sad falling off from the lawn and orchard at Sheen, and he feared that Lucy would regret the change.

Lucy had no regrets. The larger rooms at Lambeth, the dwarf cupboards on each side of the parlour fireplace, the convenient closets on the upper floor, the doorsteps and iron railings, and the view of the river, with the Abbey and Houses of Parliament, and the crowded roofs and chimneys of Westminster, filled her with delight. The cottage and garden had been enchanting while the glamour of newly wedded love shone upon them; but by the time her spirits had settled into a calm commonplace of domestic life Lucy had discovered that she hated the country, and smelt ghosts under the sloping ceilings of those quaint cottage garrets where generations of labouring men and women had been born and died. Not unseldom had she longed for the bustle of Moorfields, and the din and riot of Bartholomew Fair, the annual treat of her childhood.

She arranged her furniture in the new home with complacency, and thought her son's nursery and her best parlour the prettiest rooms in the world, much nicer to live in than her ladyship's suite of saloons, where the splendid spaciousness scared her. She had known few happier hours in her life than the February afternoon when Lady Kilrush and Sophy Potter came to tea, and were both full of compliments upon her parlour, which had been newly done up, with the panelled dado painted pink, and a wallpaper sprinkled with roses and butterflies.

Sophy Potter, who retired into the background of Antonia's life in St. James's Square, was often her companion in her visits to the poor, and took very kindly to the work. As it was hardly possible to avoid the peril of small-pox in such visits, Mr. Stobart prevailed upon mistress and maid to submit to the ordeal of inoculation. The operation in Sophy's case was succeeded by a mild form of the malady; but the virus had no effect upon Antonia, and her physician argued that the vigour of a constitution which resisted the artificial infection would ensure her immunity from the disease. Neither her husband's entreaties, nor the example of Lady Kilrush could induce Mrs. Stobart to brave the perils of inoculation. It was in vain that George pleaded, and set a doctor to argue with her. Her horror of the small-pox made her shrink with tears and trembling from the notion of the lightest attack produced artificially.

"If it kills me you will be sorry for having forced me to consent," she said, and George reluctantly submitted to her refusal. She never went among his poor, and had never expressed a desire to see them.

"I saw enough of such wretches round Moorfields," she said. "I never want to go near them again. And I have quite enough to do to keep my house clean, and look after my little boy. You would want another servant if I went trapesing about your lanes and alleys, when I ought to be washing the tea-things and polishing the furniture."

Could he be angry with her for being industrious and keeping his house a pattern of neatness? He had long ago come to understand the narrow range of her thoughts and feelings; but while she was pious and gentle and his devoted wife, he had no ground for thinking he had made a mistake in choosing a lowborn helpmeet.

From the hurried idleness of a fashionable life Antonia stole many hours for the dwellings of the poor. In most of her visits to those haunts of misery she was attended by Stobart; but she had a way of eluding his guardianship sometimes, and would set out alone, or with Miss Potter, on one of her visits of mercy.

As time went on he grew more apprehensive of danger in her explorations; for now that she was familiar with the class among which he worked, her intrepid spirit tempted her to plunge deeper into the dark abyss of guilty and unhappy lives.

The time came when he could no longer bear to think of the perils that surrounded her in the close and fetid alleys where typhus and small-pox were never wholly absent; and at the risk of offending her he assumed the voice of authority.

"You told me once that I was your only family connection," he said, "and I presume upon that slender tie to forbid you running such risks as you incur when you enter such a den of fever as the house where I found you yesterday."

"What, sir, you forbid me?—you whose clarion call startled me from my selfish pleasure; you who showed me my worthless life!"

"You have done much to redeem that worthlessness, by your sacrifice of income."

"Sacrifice! You know, sir, that in your heart of hearts you despise such paltering with charity. In your estimation, not to give all is to give nothing!"

"You paint me as a bigot, madam, and not as a Christian. Be sure that He who praised the Samaritan approves your charity, and that He who holds the seven stars in His right hand will open your eyes to the light of revelation. A soul so lofty will not be left for ever in darkness. But in the mean time there can be no good done by your presence in places where you hazard health and life. You have made me your almoner, and it is my duty to see that the uttermost good is done with the money you have entrusted to me. Your own presence in those perilous places is useless. You have no gospel to carry to the sick and dying."

"Oh, sir, I have sympathy and compassion to give them. I doubt they get enough of the gospel, and that the company of a woman who can feel for their sufferings and soothe them in their pain is not without use. There is no sick-bed that I have sat by where I have not been entreated to return. The poor creatures like to tell me their troubles, to expatiate on their miseries, and I listen, and never let them think I am tired."

"You scatter gold among them; you demoralize them by your reckless almsgiving."

"No, no, no! I feed them. If there come days when the larder is empty, they have at least the memory of a feast. Your gospel will not stop the pangs of hunger. That is but a hysterical devotion which goes famishing to bed to dream of the Golden City with jasper walls, and the angels standing round the throne. Dreams, dreams, only dreams! You stuff those suffering creatures with dreams."

"I strive to make them look beyond their sufferings here to the unspeakable bliss of the life hereafter," Stobart answered gravely; and then he entreated her to go no more into those alleys where he now worked every day, and from which he came to her two or three times a week to report progress.

He came to her after his work, in the hour before the six o'clock tea at which she was rarely without visitors. If he was told she had company he went away without seeing her; but between five and six was the likeliest hour for finding her alone, since her drawing-rooms were crowded with morning visitors, and her evenings were seasons of gaiety at home or abroad.

She received him always in the library, a room she loved, and where they had had their first serious conversation. Here, if he looked tired, she would order in the urn and tea-things, and would make tea for him, while he told her the story of the day. To sit in an easy-chair beside the wood fire and to have her minister to him made an oasis of rest in the desert of toil, and he soon began to look forward to this hour as the bright spot in his life, the recompense for every sacrifice of self.

The first thunder of a footman's double knock, the clatter of high heels and rustle of brocade in the hall, sent him away. He had made no second appearance among her modish visitors.

"Go and shine, and sparkle, and flutter your jewelled wings among other butterflies," he said. "I claim no part in your life in the world; but I am proud to know that there are hours in which you are something better than a woman of fashion."

The pleasures of the town and the assiduities of Antonia's friends and admirers became more absorbing as her influence in the great world increased. Her open-handed hospitality, the splendour of her house, and the success of her entertainments had placed her on a pinnacle of ton.

She held her own among the greatest ladies in London, and was on familiar terms with all the duchesses—Portland, Queensberry, Norfolk, Bedford, Hamilton—and nobody ever reminded her, by a shade of difference in their appreciation, that she had not been born in the purple.

She had more admirers than she took the trouble to count, and had refused offers of marriage that most women would have found irresistible. Charles Townshend had followed and courted her; and in spite of all she could do to discourage his addresses by a light gaiety of manner that proclaimed her indifference, he had found her alone one morning, and flung himself on his knees to sue for her hand.

Deeply hurt when she rejected him, he reproached her for having fooled him by her civility.

"Oh, sir, would you have me distant or sullen to the most brilliant man in London? I thought I let you see that, though I loved your company, my heart was disengaged, and that I had no preference for one man over another."

"I doubt, madam, you despise a plain mister, and will wait for the next marrying Duke. Wert not for the recent Marriage Act you might aspire to a prince of the blood royal. Your ambition would be justified by your beauty; and I believe your pride is equal to your charms."

"I shall never marry again, Mr. Townshend. I loved my husband; and the tragedy of our marriage made that love more sacred than the common affection of wives."

"Nay, madam, is there not something more potent than the memory of a departed husband, which makes you scorn my passion? I have several times met a certain grave gentleman in your hall, who seems privileged to enjoy your society when you have no other company, and who leaves you when your indifferent acquaintance are admitted."

"That gentleman is my dear lord's cousin, and a married man. He can have no influence upon my resolve against a second marriage."

She rang a bell, and made Mr. Townshend a curtsey which meant dismissal. He retired in silent displeasure, knowing that he had affronted her.

"'Tis deuced hard to be cut out by a sneaking Methodist," he muttered as he followed the footman downstairs.

He spent the evening at White's, played higher and drank deeper than usual, and was weak enough to mention the lady's name with a scornful anger which betrayed his mortification; and before the next night all the town knew that Townshend had been refused.

The rumour came to Stobart's knowledge a week later by means of a paragraph in the Daily Journal, with the usual initials and the usual stars. "Lady K., the beautiful widow, has fallen out with Mr. C. T., the aspiring politician, wit and trifler, whose eminent success as a lady-killer has made him unable to endure rejection at the hands of a beauty who, after all, belongs but to the lower ranks of the peerage, and cannot boast of a genteel ancestry."

Stobart read this stale news in a three-days'-old paper at the shabby coffee-house in the Borough, where he sometimes took a snack of bread and cheese and a glass of twopenny porter, instead of going home to dinner.

"I doubt she has many such offers," he thought, "for she hangs out every bait that can tempt a lover—beauty, parts, fortune. If she has refused Townshend 'tis, perhaps, only because there is some one else pleases her better. She will marry, and I shall lose her; for 'tis likely her husband will cut short her friendship for a follower of John Wesley, lest the Word of God should creep into his house unawares."

He left London early in April in Mr. Wesley's company, and rode with that indefatigable man through the rural English landscape, making from forty to fifty miles a day, and halting every day at some market cross, or on some heathy knoll on the outskirts of town or village, to preach the gospel to listening throngs. Their journey on this occasion took them through quiet agricultural communities and small market towns, where the ill-usage that Wesley had suffered at Bolton and at Falmouth was undreamt of among the congregations who hung upon his words and loved his presence. He was now in middle life, hale and wiry, a small, neatly built man, with an extraordinary capacity for enduring fatigue, and a serene temper which made light of scanty fare and rough quarters. He was an untiring rider, but had never troubled himself to acquire the art of horsemanship, and as he mostly read a book during his country rides, he had fallen into a slovenly, stooping attitude over the neck of his horse. He had been often thrown, but rarely hurt, and had a Spartan indifference to such disasters. He loved a good horse, but was willing to put up with any beast that would carry him to the spot where he was expected. He hated to break an appointment, and was the most punctual as well as the most polite of men.

He liked George Stobart, having assayed his mental and moral qualities at the beginning of their acquaintance, and having pronounced him true metal. He was a man of wide sympathies, and during this April journey through the heart of Hertfordshire, and then by the wooded pastures and wide grassy margins of the Warwickshire coach roads between Coventry and Stratford-on-Avon, he discovered that something was amiss with his helper.

"I hope you do not begin to tire of your work, Stobart," he said. "There are some young men I have seen put their hands to the plough in a fever of faith and piety, and drive their first furrow deep and straight, and then faith grows dim, and the line straggles, and my sorrowful heart tells me that the labourer is good for nothing. But I do not think you are of that kidney."

"I hope not, sir."

"But I see there is trouble of some sort on your mind. We passed a vista in that oak wood yonder, with the smiling sun showing like a disk of blood-red gold at the end of the clearing; and you, who have such an eye for landscape, stared at it with a vacant gaze. I'll vouch for it you have uneasy thoughts that come between you and God's beautiful world."

"I trouble myself without reason, sir, about a soul that I would fain win for Christ, and cannot."

"'Tis of your cousin's widow, Lady Kilrush, you are thinking," Wesley said, with a keen glance.

"Oh, sir, how did you divine that?"

"Because you told me of the lady's infidel opinions; and as I know how lavish she has been with her money in helping your work among the poor, I can understand that in sheer gratitude you would desire to bring her into the fold. I doubt you have tried, in all seriousness?"

"I have tried, sir; but not hard enough. My cousin is a strange creature—generous, impetuous, charitable; but she has a commanding temper, and a light way of putting me off in an argument, which make it hard to reason with her. And then I doubt Satan has ever the best of it, and that 'tis easier to argue on the evil side, easier to deny than to prove. When I am in my cousin's company, and we are both interested in the wretches she has saved from misery, I find myself forgetting that while she snatches the sick and famished from the jaws of death, her immortal soul is in danger of a worse death than the grave, and that in all the time we have been friends nothing has been done for her salvation."

"Mr. Stobart, I doubt you have thought too much of the woman and too little of the woman's unawakened soul," Wesley said, with grave reproof. "Her beauty has dazzled your senses; and conscience has been lulled to sleep. As your pastor and your friend I warn you that you do ill to cherish the company of a beautiful heathen, save with the sole intent of accomplishing her salvation."

"Oh, sir, can you think me so weak a wretch as to entertain one unworthy thought in relation to this lady, who has ever treated me with a sisterly friendship? The fact that she is exquisitely beautiful can make no difference in my concern for her. I would give half the years of my life to save her soul; and I see her carried along the flood-tide of modish pleasures, the mark for gamesters and spendthrifts, and I dread to hear that she has been won by the most audacious and the worst of the worthless crew."

"If you can keep your own conscience clear of evil, and win this woman from the toils of Satan, you will do well," said Wesley, "but tamper not with the truth; and if you fail in bringing her to a right way of thinking, part company with her for ever. You know that I am your friend, Stobart. My heart went out to you at the beginning of our acquaintance, when you told me of your marriage with a young woman so much your inferior in worldly rank, for your attachment to a girl of the servant class recalled my own experience. The woman I loved best, before I met Mrs. Wesley, was a woman who had been a domestic servant, but whose intellect and character fitted her for the highest place in the esteem of all good people. Circumstances prevented our union—and—I made another choice."

He concluded his speech with an involuntary sigh, and George Stobart knew that the great leader, who had many enthusiastic followers and helpers among the women of his flock, had not been fortunate in that one woman who ought to have been first in her sympathy with his work.

Stobart spent a month on the road with his chief, preaching at Bristol and to the Kingswood miners, and journeying from south to north with him, in company with one of Wesley's earliest and best lay preachers, a man of humble birth, but greatly gifted for his work among assemblies in which more than half of his hearers were heathens, to whom the Word of God was a new thing—souls dulled by the monotony of daily toil, and only to be aroused from the apathy of a brutish ignorance by an emotional preacher. Those who had stood by Whitefield's side when the tears rolled down the miners' blackened faces, knew how strong, how urgent, how pathetic must be the appeal, and how sure the result when that appeal is pitched in the right key.

The little band bore every hardship and inconvenience of a journey on horseback through all kinds of weather, with unvarying good humour; for Wesley's cheerful spirits set them so fine an example of Christian contentment that they who were his juniors would have been ashamed to complain.

In some of the towns on their route Mr. Wesley had friends who were eager to entertain the travellers, and in whose pious households they fared well. In other places they had to put up with the rough meals and hard beds of inns rarely frequented by gentlefolks; or sometimes, belated in desolate regions, had to take shelter in a roadside hovel, where they could scarce command a loaf of black bread for their supper, and a shakedown of straw for their couch.

May had begun when Wesley and his deacons arrived in London, after having preached to hundreds of thousands on their way. Stobart had been absent more than a month, and the time seemed much longer than it really was by reason of the distances traversed and the varieties of life encountered on the way. He had received a weekly letter from his wife, who told him of all her household cares, and of Georgie's daily growth in childish graces. He had answered all her letters, telling her of his adventures on the road, in which she took a keen interest, loving most of all to hear of the fine houses to which he was invited, the dishes at table, and the way they were served, the tea-things and tray, and if the urn were copper or silver, also the dress of the ladies, and whether they wore linen aprons in the morning. He knew her little weaknesses, and indulged her, and rarely returned from a journey without bringing her some trifling gift for her house, a cream-jug of some special ware, a damask table-cloth, or something he knew she loved.

Their union had been one of peace and a tranquil affection, which on Stobart's part outlived the brief fervour of a self-sacrificing love. The romantic feeling, the glow of religious enthusiasm which had led to his marriage, belonged to the past; but he told himself that he had done well to marry the printer's daughter, and that she was the fittest helpmeet he could have chosen, since she left him free to work out his salvation, and submitted with gentle obedience to the necessities of his spiritual life.

"Mr. Wesley would thank Providence for so placid a companion," he thought, having heard of his leader's sufferings from a virago who opened and destroyed his letters, insulted his friends, and tormented him with an unreasoning jealousy that made his home life a kind of martyrdom.

During that religious pilgrimage Stobart had written several times to Lady Kilrush—letters inspired by his intercourse with Wesley, and by the spiritual experiences of the day; letters written in the quiet of a sleeping household, and aflame with the ardent desire to save that one most precious soul from eternal condemnation. He had written with a vehement importunity which he had never ventured in his conversation; had wrestled with the infidel spirit as Jacob wrestled with the angel; had been moved even to tears by his own eloquence, carried away by the ardour of his feelings.

"Since I was last in your company I have seen multitudes won from Satan; have seen the roughest natures softened to penitent tears at the story of Calvary—the hardest hearts melted, reprobates and vagabonds laying down their burden of sins, and taking up the Cross. And I have thought of you, so gifted by nature, so rare a jewel for the crown of Christ—you whose inexhaustible treasures of love and compassion I have seen poured upon the most miserable of this world's outcasts, the very scum and refuse of debased humanity. You, so kind, so pitiful, so clear of brain and steadfast of purpose, can you for ever reject those Divine promises, that gift of eternal life by which alone we are better than the brutes that perish?"

"Alas! dear sir," Antonia wrote in her reply to this last letter, "can you not be content with so many victories, so great a multitude won from Satan, and leave one solitary sinner to work out her own destiny? If my mind could realize your kingdom of the saints, if I could believe that far off, in some vague region of this universe, whose vastness appals me, there is a world where I shall see the holy teacher of Nazareth, hear words of ineffable wisdom from living lips, and, most precious of all, see once again in a new and better life the husband who died in my arms, I would accept your creed with ecstatic joy. But I cannot. My father taught me to reason, not to dream; and I have no power to unlearn what I learnt from him, and from the books he put into my hands. Do not let us argue about spiritual things. We shall never agree. Teach me to care for the poor and the wretched with a wise affection, and to use my fortune as a good woman, Pagan or Christian, ought to use riches, for the comfort of others, as well as for her own pleasure in the only world she believes in."

The London season, which in those days began and ended earlier than it does now, was growing more brilliant as it neared the close. When Mr. Stobart returned to town, Ranelagh, Vauxhall, the Italian Opera, Handel's Oratorios, the two patent theatres, and that little theatre in the Haymarket, where the malicious genius of Samuel Foote revelled in mimicry and caricature, were crowded nightly with the salt of the earth; and the ruinous pleasures of the St. James's Street clubs—White's, Arthur's, and the Cocoa Tree—were still in full swing, to the apprehension and horror of fathers and mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts, who might wake any morning to hear that son or husband, brother or lover, had been reduced to beggary between midnight and dawn. Losses at cards that ruined families, disputes that ended in blood, were the frequent tragedies that heightened the comedy of fashionable life by the zest of a poignant contrast.

George Stobart returned to London with Wesley's counsel in his mind. He had been told his duty as a Christian. He must hold no commune with a daughter of Belial, save in the hope of leading her into the fold. If his most strenuous endeavours failed to convert the unbeliever he must renounce her friendship and see her no more. He must not trifle with sacred things, honour her for a compassionate and generous disposition, admire her natural gifts, and forget that she was a daughter of perdition.

He recalled the hours he had spent in her company, hours in which all religious questions had been ignored while they discussed the means of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Surely they had been about the Master's work, though the Master's name had not been spoken. He remembered how, instead of being instant in season and out of season, he had kept silence about spiritual things, had even encouraged her to talk of those trivial pleasures she loved too well—the court, the opera, her patrician friends, her social triumphs. He recalled those romantic legends in which some pious knight, journeying towards the Holy Land, meets a lovely lady in distress, succours her, pities, and even loves her, only to discover the flames of hell in those luminous eyes, the fiery breath of Satan upon those alluring lips. He swore to be resolute with himself and inexorable to her, to accept no compromises, to reject even her gold, if he could not make her a Christian.

In his anxiety for her spiritual welfare it was a bitter disappointment to him not to find her at home when he called in St. James's Square on the day after his return. He called again next day, and was told that she was dining with the Duchess of Portland at Whitehall, and was to accompany her grace to the Duchess of Norfolk's ball in the evening.

He felt vexed and offended at this second repulse, yet he had reason to be grateful to her for her kindness to his wife during his absence. She, the fine lady, whose every hour was allotted in the mill-round of pleasure, had taken Lucy and the little boy to Hyde Park in her coach, and for long country drives to Chiswick and Kew, and had even accepted an occasional dish of tea in the parlour at Crown Place, had heard Georgie repeat one of Dr. Watts's hymns, and had brought him a present of toys from Mrs. Chevenix's, such as no Lambeth child had ever possessed.

He had been full of work since his return, visiting his schools and infant nurseries, and preaching in an old brewhouse which he had converted into a chapel, where he held a nightly service, consisting of one earnest prayer, a chapter of the New Testament, and a short sermon of friendly counsel, gentle reproof of evil habits and evil speech, and fervent exhortation to all sinners to lead a better life; and where he held, also, a class for adults who had never been taught to read or write, and for whom he laboured with unvarying patience and kindness.

He was more out of humour than a Christian should have been when, on his third visit to St. James's Square, he was told that her ladyship was confined to her room by a headache, and desired not to be disturbed, as she was going to the masquerade that evening.

The porter spoke of "the masquerade" with an assurance that no gentleman in London could fail to know all about so distinguished an entertainment.

Stobart left the door in a huff. It was six weeks since he had seen her face, and she valued his friendship so little that she cared not how many times he was sent away from her house. She would give herself no trouble to receive him.

Instead of going home to supper he wandered about the West End till nightfall, when streets and squares began to be alive with links and chairmen. At almost every door there was a coach or a chair, and the roll of wheels over the stones made an intermittent thunder. Everybody of any importance was going to the masquerade, which was a subscription dance at Ranelagh, given by a number of bachelor noblemen, and supposed to be accessible only to the choicest company; though 'twas odds that a week later it would be known that more than one notorious courtesan had stolen an entrance, and displayed her fine figure and her diamonds among the duchesses.

A fretful restlessness impelled Stobart to pursue his wanderings. The thought of the Lambeth parlour, with the sky shut out, and the tallow candles guttering in their brass candlesticks, oppressed him with an idea of imprisonment.

He walked at random, his nerves soothed by the cool night air, and presently, having turned into a main thoroughfare, found himself drifting the way the coaches and chairs were going, in a procession of lamps and torches, an undulating line of fire and light that flared and flickered with every waft of the south-west wind.

All the road between St. James's and Chelsea had a gala air to-night, for 'twas said the old king and the Duke of Cumberland would be at Ranelagh. People were standing in open doorways, groups were gathered at street corners, eager voices named the occupants of chariot or sedan, mostly wrong. The Duke of Newcastle was greeted with mingled cheers and hisses; Fox evoked a storm of applause; and young Mrs. Spencer's diamonds were looked at with gloating admiration by milliners' apprentices and half-starved shirt-makers.

Stobart went along with the coaches on the Chelsea Road to the entrance of Ranelagh, where a mob had assembled to see the company—a mob which seemed as lively and elated as if to stand and stare at beauty and jewels, fops and politicians, afforded almost as good an entertainment as the festivity under the dome. Having made his way with some elbowing to the front row, Stobart had a near view of the company, who had to traverse some paces between the spot where their coaches drew up and the Doric portico which opened into the rotunda, that magnificent pleasure-house which has been compared to the Pantheon at Rome for size and architectural dignity.

The portico was ablaze with strings and festoons of many-coloured lamps, and from within there came the inspiring sounds of dance music played by an orchestra of strings and brasses—sounds that mingled with the trampling of horses' hoofs, the cracking of whips, the oaths of coachmen, and the remonstrances of link-boys and footmen, trying to keep back the crowd.

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the front row at the appearance of a tall woman, masked, and wearing a long pink satin cloak, which fell back as she descended from her chariot, revealing a magnificent form attired as Diana, in a white satin tunic which displayed more of a handsome leg than is often given to the public view, and a gauze drapery that made no envious screen between admiring eyes and an alabaster bust and shoulders.

"I'll wager her ladyship came out in such a hurry she forgot to put on her clothes," said one spectator.

"I say, Sally," cried another, "if you or me was to come out such a figure, we should be in the stocks or the pillory before we went home."

"Sure 'tis a kindness in a great lady to show us that duchesses are made of flesh and blood like common folks, only finer."

Flashing eyes defied the crowd as the handsome duchess strode by, her silver buskins glittering in the rainbow light, her head held at an imperial level, admiring fops closing round her, with their hands on their sword-hilts, ready to repress or to punish insult.

"Sure, Charley, one would suppose these wretches had never seen a handsome woman till to-night," laughed the lady.

"I doubt they never have seen so much of one," answered the gentleman in a half-whisper, on which he was called "beast," and rebuked with a smart tap from Diana's fan.

A great many people had arrived, peeresses without number, and among them Katharine, Duchess of Queensberry, Prior's Kitty, made immortal by a verse. This lovely lady appeared in a studied simplicity of white lute-string, without a jewel—a beauty unadorned that had somewhat missed fire at the last birthday, against the magnificence of her rivals. The beautiful Duchess of Hamilton went by with her lovely sister, Lady Coventry, radiant in a complexion of white-lead which was said to be killing her. Starry creatures like goddesses passed in a glittering procession; the music, the babel of voices from within, made a tempest of sound; but she had not yet appeared, and Stobart waited to see her pass.

She came in her chariot, like Cinderella in the fairy tale. Hammer-cloth and liveries were a blaze of gold and blue. Three footmen hung behind, with powdered heads, sky-blue velvet coats, white breeches, pink stockings and gold garters—gorgeous creatures that leapt down to open the coach door and let down the steps, but were not suffered to come near her, for a bevy of her admirers had been watching for her arrival, and crowded about her carriage door, thrusting her lackeys aside.

She laughed at their eagerness.

"'Twas vastly kind of you to wait for me, Sir Joseph," she said to the foremost. "I should scarce have dared to plunge into the whirlpool of company unattended. Lady Margaret had a couple of young things to bring, who insisted upon coming here directly the room opened, so I let her come without me. I love a fête best at the flood-tide. Sure your lordship must think me monstrous troublesome if I have robbed you of a dance," she added, turning to a tall man in smoke-coloured velvet and silver.

"I think your ladyship knows that there is but one woman in Europe I love to dance with," said Lord Dunkeld, gravely.

He was a man of distinguished rank and fortune, distinguished merit also—a man whom Stobart had known and admired in his society days.

"Then 'tis some woman in Asia you are thinking of when I see you distrait or out of spirits," Antonia said lightly, as she took his arm.

"Alas! fair enslaver, you know too well your power to make me happy or wretched," he murmured in her ear.

"I hope everybody will be happy to-night," she said gaily, "or you subscribing gentlemen, who have taken so much trouble to please us, will be ill-paid for your pains. For my own part, I mean to think Ranelagh the seventh heaven, and not to refuse a dance."

She wore her velvet loup, with a filmy border of Brussels that clouded the carmine of her lips. Her white teeth flashed against the black lace, her smile was enchantingly gay.

Stobart heard her in a gloomy temper. What hope was there for such a woman—so given over to worldly pleasures, with no capacity for thought of serious things, no desire for immortality, finding her paradise in a masquerade, her happiness in the adulation of fools?

"How can I ever bring her nearer to God while she lives in a perpetual intoxication of earthly pleasures, while she so exults in her beauty and her power over the hearts of men?"

She wore a diamond tiara and necklace of matchless fire. Her gown was white and silver, the stomacher covered with coloured jewels that flashed between the opening of her long black silk domino, an ample garment with loose sleeves. She had arrayed herself in all her splendour for this much-talked-of masquerade, wishing to do honour to the gentlemen who gave the treat.

"Bid my servants fetch me at one o'clock, if you please, Sir Joseph," she said to the cavalier on her left.

"At one! Impossible! 'Tis nearly eleven already. I shall order them at three, and I'll wager they'll have to wait hours after that."

"You make very sure of your dance pleasing folks," she said. "I doubt I shall have yawned myself half dead before three o'clock; but you'll have to find me a seat in a dark corner where I can sleep behind my fan."

"There are no dark corners—except in the gallery for lovers and dowagers—and I pledge myself nobody under forty shall have any disposition for slumber," protested Sir Joseph, as he ran off to give her orders.

She passed under the lamp-lit portico on Lord Dunkeld's arm.

"That is the man she will marry," Stobart thought, as he walked away, hurrying from the crowd and the lights, and noise and laughter, and past a tavern a little way off, in front of which an army of footmen and links were gathered, and where they and the crowd were being served with beer and gin. He was glad to get into a dark lane that led towards Westminster Bridge, skirting the river, and to be able to think quietly.

She would marry Dunkeld. Was it not the best thing she could do—her best chance for the saving of that immortal soul which he had tried in vain to save? Dunkeld was no idle pleasure-lover, though he mixed in the diversions of his time. He was a politician, had written more than one pamphlet that had commanded the attention of the town. He was a good Churchman, a regular attendant at the Chapel Royal. He was rich enough to be above suspicion of mercenary views. He had never been a gambler or a profligate. He was seven and thirty, Antonia's senior by about twelve years. Assuredly she would be safer from the evil of the time as Dunkeld's wife than in her present unprotected position.

He repeated these arguments with unending iteration throughout his homeward walk. It was perhaps his duty to urge this union upon her. She had never spoken to him of Dunkeld, or in so casual a tone that he had suspected her of no uncommon friendship for that excellent man; yet he could hardly doubt that she favoured his suit. Dunkeld was handsome, accomplished, of an ancient Scottish family, had made his mark in the English House of Commons. Stobart could scarcely believe it possible that such a suitor had failed to engage Antonia's affections. At any rate, it was his duty—his duty as a friend, as a Christian—to persuade her to this marriage.

He found his wife sitting up for him, and the supper untouched, though it was midnight when he got home. The supper was but a frugal meal of bread and cheese, a spring salad, and small beer; but the table was neatly laid with a clean damask cloth, and adorned with a Lowestoft bowl of wallflowers. Lucy had a genius for small things, and was quick to learn any art that light hands and perseverance could accomplish.

"How late you are, George!" she exclaimed. "I was almost frightened. Have you been teaching your night class all these hours?"

"No, 'tis not a class night. I have been roaming the streets, full of thought, but idle of purpose. I let myself drift with the crowd, and went to stare at the fine people going into Ranelagh."

"You! Well, 'tis a wonder. But why didn't you take me? I should have loved to see the fancy dresses and masks and dominos. Indeed, I should have asked you many a time to let me see the quality going to Court, only I fancied you thought all such shows wicked."

"A wicked waste of time. I doubt I have been wickedly wasting my time to-night, Lucy; yet perhaps some good may come of my idleness. God can turn even our errors to profit."

"Oh, George, I have done very wrong," his wife said, with sudden seriousness. "I have forgotten something."

"Nay, child, 'tis not the first time. Thy genius never showed strongest in remembering things."

"But this was a serious thing, and you'll scold me when you know it."

"Be brief, dear, and I promise to be indulgent."

"You know Sally Dormer, the poor woman that's in a consumption, and that you and her ladyship are concerned about?"

"Yes."

"Her young brother called the day you came home, and told me the doctor had given her over, and she wanted to see you—she was pining and fretting because you was away; and she had been a terrible sinner, the boy said, and was afeared to meet her God. I meant to tell you the first minute I saw you, George; and then I was so glad to see you, and that put everything out of my head."

"And kept it out of your head for a week, Lucy—the prayer of a dying woman?"

"Ah, now you are angry with me."

"No, no; but I am sorry—very sorry. The poor soul is dead, perhaps. I might have been with her at the last hour, and might have given her hope and comfort. You should not forget such things as those, Lucy; your heart should serve instead of memory when a dying penitent's peace is in question."

"Oh, I am a hateful wretch, and I'd sooner you scolded me than not. But you had been away so long, and I had fretted about you, and was so glad to have you again."

She was in tears, and he held out his hand to her across the table.

"Don't cry, Lucy. Perhaps I do ill to leave you—even in God's service; but the call is strong."

He left his thought unspoken. He had been thinking that the man who gave himself to the service of Christ should have neither wife nor child. The earthly and the heavenly love were not compatible.

"I will go to Sally's garret the first thing to-morrow morning," he said. "Please God I may not be too late!"

He was silent for the rest of the meal, and his slumbers were brief and perturbed, his fitful sleep haunted by visions of splendour and beauty: the brazen duchess, erstwhile maid-of-honour, wife of two husbands, radiant and half-naked as the goddess of chastity, with a diamond crescent on her brow; and that other woman, whose modest bearing gave the grace of purity even to the splendour of her jewels and glittering silver gown. Dream faces followed him through the labyrinth of sleep, and his last dream was of the nightmare kind. He was in the retreat at Fontenoy, fighting at close quarters with a French dragoon, whom he knew of a sudden for the foul fiend in person, and that the stake for which he fought was Antonia's soul.

"He shall not have her," he cried. "I'd sooner see her another man's wife than the devil's prize."

He was awakened by his own voice, in a hoarse, gasping cry, and starting up in the broad light of a May morning, looked at his watch, and found it was half-past five. He rose quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, and made his morning toilet in a little back room that served as his dressing-closet—a Spartan chamber, in which an abundance of cold water was his only luxury. He left the house soon after six, and walked quickly through the quiet morning streets to the pestiferous alley where Sally Dormer lay dying or dead.

She was one of his penitents, a woman who was still young, and had once been beautiful, steeped in sin in the very morning of life, in the company of thieves and highwaymen, grown prematurely old in a profligate career, a courtesan's neglected offspring, and carrying the seeds of consumption from her cradle. Her mother had been dead ten years; her father had never been known to her; her only relative was a boy of eleven, her mother's sole legacy. A sermon of Whitefield's preached to thousands of hearers on Kennington Common, in the sultry stillness of an August night, had awakened her to the knowledge of sin. She was one of the many who went to hear the famous preacher, prompted by idle curiosity, and who left him changed and exalted, shuddering at the sins of the past, horrified at the perils of the future. That wave of penitent feeling might have ebbed as quickly as it rose but for George Stobart, who found the sinner while the effect of Whitefield's eloquence was new, and completed the work of conversion—a work more easily accomplished, perhaps, by reason of Sally Dormer's broken health.

She had been marked for death before that sultry night when she had stood under the summer stars, trembling at Whitefield's picture of the sinner's doom, pale to the lips as he dwelt on the terrors of hell, and God's curse upon the stubborn unbeliever. "All the curses of the law belong to you, oh, ye adamantine hearts, that melt not at the name of Jesus. Cursed are you when you go out; cursed are you when you come in; cursed are your thoughts; cursed are your words; cursed are your deeds! Everything you do, say, or think, from morning to night, is only one continued series of sin. Awake, awake, thou that sleepest, melt and tremble, heart of stone. Look to Him whom thou hast pierced! Look and love; look and mourn; look and praise. Though thou art stained with sin, and black with iniquity, thy God is yet thy God!"

Stobart had told Antonia of Sally Dormer's condition, and had provided by her means for the penitent's comfort in her lingering illness, the fatal end of which was obvious, however much her state varied from week to week. But he had opposed Antonia's desire to visit the invalid, shrinking with actual pain from the idea of any contact between the spotless woman and the castaway, who in her remorse for her past life was apt to expatiate upon vile experiences.

Five minutes' walk brought Mr. Stobart to a narrow street on the edge of the river, a street long given over to the dregs of humanity. The houses were old and dilapidated, and several of those on the water-side had been shored up at the back with timber supports, moss-grown and slimy from the river fog, yet a favourite climbing place for vagabond boys, as well as for a colony of starveling rats.

Sally's lodging was on the third story of a corner house, one of the oldest and most tumble-down, but also one of the most spacious, having formed part of a nobleman's mansion under the Tudor kings, when all the river-side was pleasaunce and garden.

The garret occupied the whole of the top floor, under a steeply sloping roof, and had two windows, one looking to the street, the other to the river. Here Sally had been slowly dying for near half a year, in charge of her little brother, and under the supervision of the dispensary doctor, who saw her daily.

The house was quiet in the summer morning. The men who had work to do had gone about it; the idlers were still in bed; the more respectable among the women were occupied with their children or their housework. Stobart met no one in the gloom of the rickety staircase, where the rotten boards offered numerous pitfalls for the unwary. He was used to ruin and decay in that water-side region, and trod carefully. The last flight was little better than a ladder, at the top of which he saw the garret door ajar, and heard a voice he knew speaking in tones so low and gentle that speech seemed a caress.

It was Antonia's voice. She was sitting by Sally Dormer's pillow, in all the splendour of white and silver brocade, diamond tiara and jewelled stomacher. Her right arm was round the sick woman, and Sally's dishevelled head leant against her shoulder.

"Great Heaven, what a change of scene!" he said, as he bent down and took Sally's hand. "'Tis not many hours since I saw you at Ranelagh."

"Were you at Ranelagh?"

"At the gate only. I do not enter such paradises. I went there last night, after your door was shut in my face for the third time. It seemed my only chance of seeing you; and the sight was worth a journey. But what madness to come here alone in your finery, to flash jewels worth a king's ransom before starving desperadoes! Sure 'twas wilfully to provoke danger."

"I am not afraid. My coach brought me to the end of the street, and my chair is to fetch me presently. I shall be taken care of, sir, be sure. This foolish Sally had set her heart on seeing me in my masquerade finery, so I came straight from Ranelagh; and I have been telling Sally about the ball and the beauties."

"An edifying discourse, truly!"

"Oh, you shall edify her to your heart's content when I am gone. I have been trying to amuse her. I stole those sweetmeats for Harry from the royal table"—smiling at the boy, who was sitting on the end of the bed, with his mouth full of bonbons. "I smuggled them into my pocket while the duke was talking to me."

"I was at Ranelagh once, your ladyship," said Sally, touching the gems on Antonia's stomacher one by one with her attenuated finger-tips, as if she were counting them, and as if their brilliancy gave her pleasure. "'Twas when I was young and lived like a lady. My first sweetheart took me there. He was a gentleman then. 'Twas before he took to the road. I dream of him often as he was in those days, seven years ago. He is changed now, and so am I. Sometimes I can scarce believe we are the same flesh and blood. 'Twas a handsome face, a dear face! I see it in my dreams every night."

"Sally, Sally, is this the spirit in which to remember your sins?" exclaimed Stobart, reprovingly. "See, madam, what mischief your mistaken kindness has done."

"No, no, no! My poor Sally is no less a true penitent because her thoughts turn for a few moments to the days that are gone. 'Tis a fault in your religion, sir, that it is all gloom. Your Master took a kinder view of life, and was indulgent to human affections as He was pitiful to human pains. Sally has made her peace with God, and believes in a happy world where her sins will be forgiven, and she will wear the white robe of innocence, and hear the songs of angels round the heavenly throne."

"If thou hast indeed assurance of salvation, Sally, thou art happier than the great ones of the earth, who wilfully refuse their portion in Christ's atoning blood, who can neither realize their own iniquity, nor the Redeemer's power to take away their sins," Stobart said gravely.

"'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,'" murmured Sally, her fingers still wandering about Antonia's jewels, touching necklace and tiara, and the raven hair that fell in heavy curls about the full white throat.

"How beautiful you are!" she murmured. "If the angels are like you, and as kind, how dearly I shall love them! Poor hell-deserving me! Will they be kind, and never cast my sins in my face, nor draw their skirts away from me, and quicken their steps, as I have seen modest women do in the streets?"

"We are told that God's angels are much kinder than modest women, Sally," Antonia answered, smiling at her as she offered a cup of cooling drink to the parched lips.

She had been teaching the eleven-year-old Harry to make lemonade for his sick sister. One of the ladies from the infant nursery came in every day to make Sally's bed and clean her room, and for the rest the precocious little brother, reared in muddle, idleness, and intermittent starvation, was much more helpful than a happier child would have been.

"Shall I read to you, Sally?" Stobart asked in his grave voice, seating himself in an old rush-bottomed chair at the foot of the bed.

"Oh, sir, pray with me, pray for me! I would rather hear your prayers than the book. They do me more good."

Antonia gently withdrew her arm from the sick woman's waist, and arranged the pillows at her back—luxurious down pillows supplied from the trop-plein of St. James's Square—and rose from her seat by the bed.

"Good-bye, Sally," she said, putting on her black domino, which she had thrown off at the invalid's request, to exhibit the splendours beneath. "I shall come and see you soon again; and I leave you with a good friend."

"Oh, my lady, do stop for a bit. I love to have you by my bed; and, oh, I want you to hear his prayers. I want you to be justified by faith, you who have never sinned."

"Hush, hush, Sally!"

"Who know not sin—like mine. I want you to believe as I do. I want to meet you in heaven among the happy souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Stay and hear him pray."

"I'll stay for a little to please you, Sally; but indeed I am out of place here," Antonia said gravely, as she resumed her seat.

Stobart was kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face bent upon his clasped hands, and the women had been speaking in almost whispers, Sally's voice being weak from illness, and Antonia's lowered in sympathy. He looked up presently after a long silence and began his prayer. He had been struggling against earthly thoughts, striving for that detachment of mind and senses which he had found more and more difficult of late, striving to concentrate all his forces of heart and intellect upon the dying woman—the newly awakened soul hovering on the threshold of eternity. Could there be a more enthralling theme, a subject more removed from earthly desires and earthly temptations?

Antonia looked at him with something of awe in her gaze. She had never heard him pray. He had argued with her; he had striven his hardest to make her think as he thought; but he had never prayed for her. Into that holier region, that nearer approach to the God he worshipped, she had never passed. The temple doors were shut against so obstinate an unbeliever, so hardened a scorner.

His face seemed the face of a stranger, transfigured by that rapture of faith in the spirit world, made like to the angels in whose actual and everlasting existence this man—this rational, educated Englishman, of an over-civilized epoch—firmly believed. He believed, and was made happy by his belief. This present life was of no more value to him than the dull brown husk of the worm that knows it is to be a butterfly. To the Voltairean this thing was wonderful. The very strangeness of it fascinated her, and she listened with deepest interest to George Stobart's prayer.

His opening invocation had a formal tone. The words came slowly, and for some minutes his prayer was woven out of those familiar and moving texts he loved, while the thoughts and feelings of the man himself rose slowly from the depths of a heart that seemed ice-bound; but the man believed in Him to whom he prayed, and presently the ice melted, and the fire came, and the speaker forgot all surrounding things—the lovely eyes watching him in a grave wonder, the feelings and doubts and apprehensions of last night. The earthly fetters fell away from his liberated soul, and he was alone with his God, as much alone as Moses on the mountain, as Christ in the garden. Then, and then only, the man became eloquent. Moving words came from the heart so deeply moved, burning words from the spirit on fire with an exalted faith.

Sally Dormer sobbed upon Antonia's breast, the unbeliever looking down upon her with a tender pity, glad that the slow and painful passage to the grave should be soothed by beautiful fables, by dreams that took the sting from death.

Perhaps the thing that moved Antonia most was the unspeakable pity and compassion, the love that this man felt for the castaway. She had been told that the Oxford Methodists were a sanctimonious, pragmatical sect, whose heaven was an exclusive freehold, and who delighted in consigning their fellow-creatures to everlasting flames. But here she found sympathy with the sinner stronger than abhorrence of the sin. And her reason—that reason of which she was so proud—told her that with such a sinner none but an enthusiast could have prevailed. It needed the fiery speech of a Whitefield, the passionate appeal of an impassioned orator, to awaken a soul so dead.

"'Awake, thou that sleepest,'" cries the Church to the heathen; but if the Church that calls is a formal, unloving, half-somnolent Church, what chance of awakening?

The great Revival had been the work of a handful of young men—men whom the Church might have kept had her rulers been able to gauge their power, but who had been sent into the fields to carry on their work of conversion as their Master was sent before them.

Antonia was no nearer belief in Stobart's creed than she had been yesterday; but she was impressed by the sincerity of the man, the vitality of an unquestioning faith.

He was interrupted in the midst of an impassioned sentence by a startling appearance. The lattice facing the river had been left open to the balmy morning air. The casement rattled suddenly, and a pair of hands appeared clutching the sill, followed almost instantly by the vision of a ghastly face with starting eyeballs and panting mouth; and then a slenderly built man scrambled through the opening, and dropped head foremost into the room, breathless, and speechless for the moment.

George Stobart started to his feet.

"What are you doing here, fellow?" he exclaimed angrily.

The man took no notice of the question, but flung himself on his knees by the bed, and grasped Sally's hand. His clothes were torn and mud-stained, one of his coat-sleeves was ripped from wrist to shoulder. Great beads of sweat rolled down his ashen face.

"Hide me, hide me, Sally," he gasped hoarsely. "If ever you loved me, save me from the gallows. Hide me somewhere behind your bed—in your closet—anywhere. The constables are after me. It's a hanging business."

"Oh, Jack, I thought you was in Georgia—safe, and leading an honest life."

"I've come back. I'm one of them that can't be honest. They're after me. I gave them the slip on the bridge—ran for my life—climbed the old timbers. Hell, how slippery they are! They'll be round the corner directly. They'll search every house in the street."

He was looking about the room with strained eyes, searching for some hole to hide in. There was a curious kind of closet in the slope of the rafters, filling an acute angle. He was making for this, then stopped and ran to the window facing the river.

"Get out of this, fellow," said Stobart. "This woman has done with the companions of sin. Go!"

"No, no," cried Antonia; "you shall not give him over to those bloodhounds."

"What, madam, would you make yourself the abettor of crime—come between a felon and the law which protects honest people from thieves and murderers?"

"I hate your laws—your inexorable judges, your murdering laws, which will hang a child that never knew right from wrong for a stolen sixpence."

"They are round the corner; they are looking at the house," gasped the fugitive, moving from the window and looking round the room in a wild despair.

He had been caught in that very house years before, when he and Sally Dormer lodged there together, and when he was one of the luckiest professionals on the Dover road, with a couple of good horses, and a genius for getting clear off after a job. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth on that occasion, the witnesses for identification breaking down in the inquiry before the magistrate. He had saved his neck and some of the profits from an audacious attack on the Dover mail, and had gone to America in a shipload of mixed company, swearing to turn honest and cheat Jack Ketch. But he could as easily have turned wild Indian; and after a spirited career in Georgia he had got himself back to London, and being in low water, without means to buy himself a good horse, had sunk to the meaner status of foot-pad, and this morning had been concerned with three others in an attempt to stop a great lady's coach on the way from Ranelagh.

A chosen few among the most dissipated of the company had kept the ball going till seven o'clock, and had gone to breakfast and cards after seven—and it was one of these great ladies whose chariot had been stopped in the loneliest part of the road, between Chelsea and the Five Fields.

Antonia was looking out of the window that overhung the street. The thief made a rush towards the same window, and stopped midway, staring at this queen-like figure in mute surprise. Her beauty, her sumptuous dress and jewels made him almost think this dazzling appearance the hallucination of his own distraught brain. "Is it real?" he muttered, and then went back to the other casement, and looked out again.

"They are coming," he said in a dull voice. "'Tis no use to hide in that rat-hole. They'd have me out in a trice. The game's up, Sally. I shall dance upon nothing at Tyburn before the month is out."

He looked to the priming of a pair of pistols which he carried in a leather belt. They were ready for work. He took his stand behind the garret door. The first man who entered that room would be accounted for. They would not risk an ascent upon those slippery old beams which he had climbed for sport many a time in his boyhood; they would make their entrance from the street. Well, there was some hope of giving them trouble on the top flight of stairs, almost as steep as a ladder, and rotten enough to let them down headlong with a little extra impetus from above.

"They are not round yet," cried Antonia, snatching up her black silk domino from the chair where it hung. "Put on this, sir. So, so"—wrapping the voluminous cloak round the thief's thin frame. "Don't cry, Sally; we'll save him if we can, for your sake; and he'll turn honest for your sake. So; the cloak covers your feet. Why, I doubt I am the taller. Now for the mask," adjusting the little loup, which fastened with a spring, over the man's face, and the silk hood over his head.

"Come, Mr. Stobart, my chair is at the door," she said breathlessly. "Take this poor wretch downstairs, bundle him into the chair, and bid my servants carry him to my house, and hide him there. They can send a hackney coach to fetch me. Quick, quick!" she cried, stamping her foot; "quick, sir, if you would save a life."

Stobart looked from the masked figure to Antonia irresolutely, and then looked out of the river window. There was a mob hurrying along the muddy shore at the heels of three Bow Street runners, who were nearing the network of timbers below. There was no time for scruples. Five minutes would give the pursuers time to come round to the front of the house.

A wailing voice came from the bed—

"Oh, sir, save him, for Christ's sake! He was my first sweetheart; and he has always been kind to me. Give him this one chance."

The fugitive had not waited, but had scrambled downstairs in his strange disguise, stumbling every now and then when his feet caught in the trailing domino.

Antonia, watching from the window, saw him dash into the street, open the door of the sedan—'twas not the first he had opened as violently—and disappear inside it.

The chairmen stood dumbfounded; and had not Stobart appeared on the instant to give them their lady's orders, might have raised an alarm. Drilled to obedience, however, the men took up their load in prompt and orderly style, and the sedan, with two running footmen guarding it, turned one corner of the street a minute before the constables came round the other.

It was an unspeakable mortification for these gentlemen when they found their bird flown, how they knew not, or, indeed, whether he had ever been in the house, which they searched from cellar to garret, giving as much trouble as they could to all its inhabitants. It was in vain that they questioned Sally Dormer, who swore it was years since she had set eyes on her old friend Jack Parsons. It shocked Stobart to see that this brand plucked from the burning could be so ready with a lie, and that the two women rejoiced in the escape of Mr. Parsons almost as if he had been a Christian martyr saved from the lions.

"He is a man; and 'twas a life—a life like yours or mine—that we were saving," Antonia said by-and-by, when he expressed surprise at her conduct. "'Tis a thing a woman does instinctively. I think I would do as much to save a sheep from the slaughter-house. 'Twas a happy thought that brought the sedan to my mind. I remembered Lord Nithisdale's escape in '15."

"Lady Nithisdale was saving her husband's life by that stratagem."

"And I was saving a thief whose face I had never seen till five minutes before I fastened my mask upon it. But I saw a man trembling for his life, like a bird in a net; and I remembered how savage our law is, and how light judge and jury make of a fellow-creature's doom. I shall pack the rascal off to America again, and dare him to do ill there after his escape. You must help me to get him down the river this night, Mr. Stobart, and stowed away upon the first ship that sails from Gravesend."

"I must, must I?"

"If you refuse, I must employ Goodwin, and that might be dangerous."

"I cannot refuse you. Can you doubt that I admire your kindness, your generous sympathy with creatures that suffer? But I tremble at the thought of a nature so impulsive, a heart so easily melted."

"Oh, it can be hard on occasion," she said proudly, remembering the lovers who had sighed at her feet and been sent away despairing, since her reign in London had begun, her supremacy as a beauty and a fortune.

Having consented to help in her work of mercy, Stobart performed his task faithfully. He had allies among the vagabond classes whose honour he could rely on, and with the help of two stalwart boatmen he conveyed Jack Parsons to Erith, and saw him on board a trading vessel, carrying a score or so of emigrants and a freight of miscellaneous merchandise to Boston, which by good luck was to sail with the next favourable wind. He provided the fugitive with proper clothing and necessaries for the voyage, which might last months, and took pains to clothe him like a small tradesman's son; and as such he was shipped, with his passage paid, and the promise of a five-pound note, to be given him by the captain before he landed in America, to maintain him till he got work.

"If the lady who saved you from the gallows should hear of you by-and-by as leading an honest life, I dare say she will help you to better yourself out yonder; but if you fall back into sin you will deserve the worst that can happen to a hardened reprobate;" and with these words of counsel, a New Testament, and Charles Wesley's hymn book, Mr. Stobart took leave of Antonia's protégé, who sobbed out broken words of gratitude to him and to the good lady, which sounded as if they came from the heart.

"I had my chance before, sir, and I threw it away—but God's curse blight me if I forget what that woman did for me."

Stobart wrote to Lady Kilrush, with an account of what he had done, but it was some days before he saw her. He had to take up the thread of his mission work, and had to wait upon Mr. Wesley more than once—to discuss his philanthropic labours—at his house by the Foundery. He saw Sally Dormer every day, and was touched by the poor creature's adoration of Antonia, whom she now regarded as a heaven-sent angel.

"Oh, sir, you told me once that her ladyship was an infidel; but, indeed, sir, whatever she says, whatever she thinks, you cannot believe that such a creature will be shut out from heaven. Sure, sir, heaven must be full of women like her, and God must love them, because they are good."

"No, Sally, God cannot love those who deny Christ."

"But indeed she does not. While you was away, when I was so ill, I asked her to read the Bible to me, and she let me choose the chapters—the Sermon on the Mount, and those chapters you love in St. John's Gospel—and she told me she loved Jesus—loved His words of kindness and mercy, His goodness to the sick and the poor, and to the little children."

"All that is no use, Sally, without faith in His atoning blood, without the conviction of sin, or the belief in saving grace. Yet I can scarce think that so good a woman as Lady Kilrush will be left for ever under the dominion of Satan. Faith will come to her some day—with the coming of sorrow."

"Yes, yes, it will come; and she will shine like a star in heaven. God cannot do without such angels round His throne."

Stobart reproved her gently for words that went too near blasphemy. He was melted by her affection for the generous friend who had done so much to brighten her declining days.

"She came to see me very often while you was away," Sally said; "and she paid the nurse-keeper to come every day, and sent me soups and jellies and all sorts of good things by a light-porter every morning. And she talks to me as if I was an honest woman. She never reminds me what a sinner I have been—or even that I'm not a lady."

It was more than a week after the scene in Sally Dormer's garret, and the ship that carried Mr. John Parsons was beating round the Start Point, when George Stobart called in St. James's Square early in the afternoon.

The dining-room door stood wide open as he crossed the hall, and he saw a long table strewed with roses and covered with gold plate, and the débris of a fashionable breakfast, chocolate-pots, champagne-glasses, carbonadoed hams, chickens and salads, jellies and junkets and creams.

"Her ladyship has been entertaining company," he said, with a sense of displeasure of which he felt ashamed, knowing how unreasonable it was. Had she not a right to live her own life, she who had never professed Christianity, least of all his kind of Christianity, which meant total renunciation of all self-indulgence, purple and fine linen, banquets and dances, splendid furniture and rich food?

"Yes, sir, her ladyship has been giving a breakfast-party to the Duke of Cumberland," replied the footman, swelling with pride. "Eight and twenty sat down—mostly dukes and duchesses—and Mr. Handel played on the 'arpsikon for an hour after breakfast. His royal 'ighness loves music," added the lackey, condescendingly, as he ushered Mr. Stobart into the library.

"Was Lord Dunkeld among the company?" Stobart asked.

"Yes, sir."

Stobart had come there charged with a mission, a self-imposed duty, which had been in his mind—paramount over all other considerations—ever since that night at Ranelagh, when he had seen Antonia and Lord Dunkeld together. Again and again he went over the same chain of reasoning, with always the same result. He saw her in the flower of youth, beautiful and impulsive, with a wild courage that scorned consequences, ready to break the law if her heart prompted; and he told himself that for such a woman marriage with a good man was the only safeguard from the innumerable perils of a woman's life. In her case marriage was inevitable. The worldlings would not cease from striving for so rich a prize. If she did not marry Dunkeld, she would marry some one else, his inferior, perhaps, in every virtue. It was his duty—his, as her friend, her earnest well-wisher—to persuade her to so suitable an alliance.

Having marked out this duty to be done, he was in a fever of anxiety to get his task accomplished. He was like a martyr, who knows death inevitable, and is eager for the faggot and the stake. That poignant eagerness was so strange a feeling—a fire of enthusiasm that was almost agony.

He walked up and down the library, agitated and impatient, his hands clasped above his head. He was wondering how she would receive his advice. She would be angry, perhaps; and would resent the impertinence of unsought counsel.

The windows were open, and the room was full of flowers and soft vernal air. A Kirkman harpsichord stood near the fireplace, scattered with loose sheets of music from the newest opera and oratorio. A guitar hung by a broad blue ribbon across an armchair. Light and trivial romances and modish magazines lay about the table; and another table was covered with baskets of shells and a half-finished picture-frame in shell-work. A white cockatoo cackled and screamed on his perch by a window. Nothing was wanting to mark the lady of fashion.

She came in, beaming with smiles, in the splendour of gala clothes, a sky-blue poplin sacque, covered with Irish lace, over a primrose satin petticoat powdered with silver shamrocks. Her hair was rolled back from her forehead, a little cap like a gauze butterfly was perched on the top of her head, and gauze lappets were crossed under her chin, and pinned with a single brilliant. The little cap gave a piquancy to her beauty, a dainty touch of the soubrette, which Boucher has immortalized in his portrait of the Pompadour.

"Well, sir," she cried gaily, making him a low curtsey, "we have broken the law between us, and I thank you heartily for your share in the offence against its majesty. Would to God that Admiral Byng could have been saved as easily!"

"You have a generous heart, madam—a heart too easily moved, perhaps, by human miseries, and I tremble for its impulses, while I admire its warmth and courage. You have never been absent from my thoughts since that morning in Sally's garret. Indeed, what man living could forget a scene so incongruous—yet—so beautiful?"

His voice faltered towards the end, and he leant against the late lord's tall armchair.

"You have not been kind in keeping away from me so long, when I was dying to give expression to my gratitude."

"Be sure my recompense was having obliged you. 'Twas superfluous to thank me. I have been very busy. I had arrears of work, and I knew all your hours were engaged."

"Sure there must always be something to do in a town full of people."

She was playing with the great white bird, smoothing his fluffy topknot, ruffling the soft saffron feathers round his neck, tempting him with the pink tips of taper fingers, flashing rose-coloured light from her diamond rings, whose splendour covered the slender hoop of gold with which Kilrush married her.

"You have been entertaining the Duke of Cumberland, I hear."

"Billy the Butcher! That's what my father and I used to call him, when we concocted Jacobite paragraphs for Lloyd's Evening Post. Yes, Mr. Stobart, I have been entertaining royalty for the first time in my life. The honour was not my own seeking either, for his royal highness challenged me to invite him."

"He would not be so much out of the fashion as not to be among your adorers."

"That is too prettily said for an Oxford Methodist. 'Tis a reminiscence of the soldier's manners. When the duke led me out for the second dance at the Duchess of Norfolk's ball he was pleased to compliment my housekeeping. 'I hear your ladyship's is the pleasantest house in town,' he said, 'but am I never to know more of it than hearsay?' On which I dropped my best curtsey, and told him that my house with all it contained was at his feet, and I had not finished my chocolate next morning before his royal highness's aide-de-camp was announced, who came to tell me his master would accept any invitation I was civil enough to send him."

"And this trivial conquest made you happy?"

"Sure it pleased me as any other toy would have done. 'Twas something to think about—whom I should invite—how I should dress my table. I strewed it from end to end with cut roses, brought up from Essex this morning, with the dew on their petals. Their perfume had a flavour of the East—some valley in Cashmere—till a succession of smoking roasts polluted the atmosphere. I had a mind to imitate mediæval feasts, and give the prince a pie full of live singing birds, but one hardly knows how the birds might behave when the pie was cut."

"You had one sensible man among your guests, I doubt."

"Merci du compliment—pour les autres. Pray who was this paragon?"

"Lord Dunkeld."

"You know Lord Dunkeld?"

"He was my intimate friend some years ago."

"Before you left off having any friends but Methodists?"

"Before I knew that life was too serious a thing for trifling friendships."

"I am glad you approve of Dunkeld. Of all my modish friends he is the one I like best."

"Is it not something better than liking? Dear Lady Kilrush, accept the counsel of a friend whose heart is tortured by the consciousness of your unprotected position, the infinite perils that surround youth and beauty in a world given over to folly—a world which the most appalling convulsion of nature and the sudden death of thousands of unprepared sinners could not awaken from its dream of pleasure. I see you in your grace and loveliness, of a character too generous to suspect evil, hemmed round with profligates, the companion of unfaithful wives and damaged misses. And since I cannot win you for Christ, since you are deaf and cold to the Saviour's voice, I would at least see you guarded by a man of honour—a man who knows the world he lives in, and would know how to protect an adored wife from its worst dangers."

"I hardly follow the drift of this harangue, sir."

"Marry Dunkeld. You could not choose a better man, and I know that he adores you."

"You are vastly kind, sir, to interest yourself in my matrimonial projects. But there is more of the old woman—the spinster aunt—in this unasked advice than I expected from so serious a person as Mr. Stobart."

"I fear you are offended."

He had grown pale to the lips as he talked to her. His whole countenance, and the thrilling note in his voice betrayed the intensity of his feeling.

"No, I am only amused. But I regret that you should have wasted trouble on my affairs. It is true that Lord Dunkeld has honoured me with the offer of his hand on more than one occasion, but he has had his answer; and he is so sensible a man that in rejecting him as a lover I have not lost him as a friend."

"He will offer again, and you will accept him."

"Never!" she exclaimed with sudden energy, dropping her light, half-mocking tone, and looking at him with flashing eyes. "I shall never take a second husband, sir. You may be sure of that."

A crimson fire flashed across his pallid face, and slowly faded. He drew a deep breath, and there was a silence of moments that seemed long.

"You—you—must have some reason for such a strange resolve."

"Yes, I have my reason."

"May I know it?" he asked, trembling with emotion.

"No, sir, neither you nor any one else. 'Tis my own secret. And now let us talk of other matters. It was on your conscience to give me a spinster aunt's advice. You have done your duty very prettily, and your conscience can be at rest."

He stood looking at her in a strange silence. The beautiful face which had fired with a transient passion was now only pensive. She seated herself in her favourite chair by the open window, took up a tapestry-frame, and began to work in minute stitches that needed exquisite precision of eye and hand.

How much of his future life or earthly happiness he would have given to fathom her thoughts! He had come there to persuade her to marry; he had convinced himself that she ought to marry; and yet his heart was beating with a wild gladness. He felt like a wretch who had escaped the gallows. The rope had been round his neck when the reprieve came.

"Tell me about your night-school," she said, without looking up from her work. "Do the numbers go on increasing?"

"I—I—can't talk of the school to-day," he said. "I have a world of business on my hands. Good-bye."

He left her on the instant without offering his hand, hurried through the hall, and opened the great door before the porter, somnolent after the morning's bustle, could struggle out of his leathern chair.

"Never, never, never more must I cross that threshold," he told himself as he walked away.

He stopped on the other side of the road, and looked back at the great handsome house, so dull externally, with its long rows of uniform windows, its massive pediment and heavy iron railings, with the tall extinguishers on each side of the door in a flourish of hammered iron.

"If I ever enter that house again I shall deserve to perish everlastingly," he thought.

'Twas four o'clock, and the sun was blazing, a midsummer afternoon in early May. He walked to his house in Lambeth like a man in a dream, from which he seemed to wake with a startled air when his wife ran out into the passage to welcome him.

"How pale you look," she said. "Is it one of your old headaches?"

"No, no; 'tis nothing but the sudden heat. You are pale enough yourself, poor little woman! Come, Lucy, give me an early tea, and I'll take you and the boy for a jaunt up the river."

"Oh, George, how good you are! 'Tis near a year since you gave us a treat, or yourself a holiday."

"I have worked too hard, perhaps, and might have given you more pleasure. 'Tis difficult not to be selfish, even in trying to do good."

"I'll have tea ready in a jiffy, and Georgie dressed. I've been sitting at the window watching the boats, and wishing ever so to be on the river."

"Thou shalt have thy wish for this once, love," he said gently.

He was silent all through the simple meal, eating hardly anything, though 'twas the first food he had tasted since a seven-o'clock breakfast. He found himself wondering at the sunshine and the brightness of things, like a man who has come away from a newly filled grave—a grave where all his hopes and affections lie buried.

Lucy and her boy sat opposite him, and in the gaiety of their own prattle were unaware of his silence. The boy was three years old, and of an inexhaustible loquacity, having been encouraged to babble in Lucy's lonely hours. The sweet little voice ran on like a ripple of music, his mother hushing him every now and then, while Stobart sat with his head leaning on his hand, thinking, thinking, thinking.

They went up the river to Putney in a skiff, Stobart rowing, and it was one of the happiest evenings in Lucy's life. She had occupation enough for all the way in pointing out the houses and churches and gardens to Georgie, who asked incessant questions. She did not see the rower's pallid brow, with its look of infinite pain.

They landed at Fulham, moored the boat at the bottom of some wooden steps, and sat on a green bank, while Georgie picked the flowers off the blossoming sedges. Stobart sat with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the opposite shore, the rustic street climbing up the hill, and white cottages scattered far apart against a background of meadowland golden with marsh marigolds.

"Has rowing made your head worse, George?" his wife asked timidly.

"No, dear, no! There is nothing the matter"—holding out his hand to her. "Only I have been thinking—thinking of you and the boy, and of your lives in that dull house by the river. It is dull, I'm afraid."

"Never, when you are at home," she answered quickly. "You are very studious, and you don't talk much; but I am happy, quite happy, when you are sitting there. To have your company is all I desire."

"I have been a neglectful husband of late, Lucy. Those poor wretches in the Marsh have taken too much of my time and thought. Whatever a man's work in the world may be, he ought to remember his home."

"It is only when you are away—quite away, on those long journeys with Mr. Wesley."

"I will give up those journeys. Let the men who have neither wives nor children carry on that work. Would you like me to take Orders, Lucy?"

"Take Orders?"

"Enter the Church of England as an ordained priest. I might settle down then, get a London living. I have friends who could help me. It would not be to break with Wesley; he is a staunch Churchman."

"Yes, yes, I should love to see you in a real pulpit in a handsome black gown. I should love you to be a clergyman. All the town would flock to hear you, and people would talk of you as they do of Mr. Whitefield."

"No, no. I have not the metal to forge his thunderbolts. But we can think about it. I mean to be a kinder husband, Lucy. Yes, my poor girl, a kinder husband. Sure ours was a love match, was it not?"

"I loved you from the moment I heard your voice, that night at the Foundery Chapel, when I woke out of a swoon and heard you speaking to me. And in all those happy days at Clapham, when I used to tremble at the sound of your footstep, and when you taught me to read good books, an ignorant girl like me, and to behave like a lady. Oh, George, you have always, always been good to me."

The sun set, and the stars shone out of the deep serene as they went home, and a profound peace fell upon George Stobart's melancholy soul. To do his duty! That was the only thing that remained to be done. He understood John Wesley's warning better now. His soul had been in peril unspeakable. He loved her, he loved her, that queen among women—loved her with a passion measured by her own perfections. As she outshone every woman he had ever seen in loveliness, mental and physical, so his love for her surpassed any love he had ever imagined.