********************START OF HEADER******************** This text has been proofread but is not guaranteed to be free from errors. Corrections to the original text have been left in place. Title: Many Daughters, an electronic edition Author: Tytler, Sarah, 1827-1914 Publisher: Digby, Long and Co., Publishers Place published: London Date: 1900 ********************END OF HEADER******************** MANY DAUGHTERS MANY DAUGHTERS BY SARAH TYLER AUTHOR OF "AUTHOR OF "CITOYENNE JACQUELINE," "THE AMERICAN COUSINS," "A CRAZY MOMENT," ETC., ETC. "Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine."GEORGE HERBERTLondonDIGBY, LONG & CO.18 Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, E.C.1900DedicatedBY KIND PERMISSION TO THE LADIES ON THE COMMITTEE OF THE WOMEN'S INSTITUTE, GROSVENOK CRESCENT, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE INTEREST THEY ARE TAKING IN THE EDUCATION AND WELL-BEING OF WORKING WOMEN Table of Contents included in front of Tyler's "Many Daughters" Table of Contents included in front of Tyler's "Many Daughters"MANY DAUGHTERS CHAPTER ITHE WOMAN'S INSTITUTE AND EMPORIUM OF TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ITS PRODUCTIONSA Body of men, not great in number, but possessed of the requisite means and intelliígence, were aroused to the difficulty of working women in all ranks, and proceeded with masculine promptitude and energy to do their best to improve matters.The leaders in the movement argued rightly that the main steps to be taken were to qualify women without private fortune to protect themselves against the wolf prowling perpetually at their doors.If possible, the abler women should acíquire an amount of affluence which would not only be a blessed security from any accumulation of rainy days, but would enable the conquerors in the fight to help the poor, that is, the weak and incapable, whom the stronger and wiser would always have with them.The reformers and philanthropists who began the enterprise maintained farther, and that still justly, that there were certain causes why women of different classes who were willing to work were often crowded out of the callings they adopted. Again, if the women succeeded in obtaining a footing in the careers open to them, the workers were notoriously insufficiently paid and reduced to accepting remuneration far below the scales of men's wages.The reason was the same in both cases. The women in the past had been only taught a few things, hence the gorging of such channels as existed for their efforts; and even in the lines which women had been accustomed to claim as their own, the instruction the candidates had received to start with was often lamentably deficient.The benefactors of the weaker sex would amend all this. An institution would be founded, consisting of technical schools and workshops, in which worthy, willing women of all ranks would be trained and disíciplined for a course of years in as many branches of skilled and remunerative labour as came within the obligations of their physique and the laws of their being.No sooner said than done. The iron was struck when hot. A technical college or cluster of colleges was founded near enough to London to command the advantage of metropolitan teachers, and yet enough in the country to secure the gain of space, fresh air and less expensive housing and feeding.There was some speculation as to what would be the most appropriate name for the institution. It would not do with calling it merely "Chesnut Green," the name of the village, for that told nothing.Something more significant must be preífixed. "The Woman's Colleges of all Trades" was suggested, but that had an alarming flavour of the despised term "Jack of all Trades," and might tempt a doubtful and suspicious public to come to the conclusion that a place where all trades were taught, though it may be by many different teachers, was a place where none would be imparted thoroughly, and a smattering of everything would be made to stand for what was in fact nothing. A third name was hit upon and adopted. It was a well - sounding, mouth - filling denomination: "The Woman's Institute and Emporium of Technical Knowledge and its Productions."The principal promoter of the gracious scheme was a Mr Ferrie, the senior partner in a long-established, wealthy banking firm.When old Mr Ferrie died it was feared that the Institution in which he had taken so deep an interest would languish, perish, like so many other fine projects started with much hope and promise.But the effect of Mr Ferrie's death was totally different from the collapse which had been dreaded.In the first place, it was found that he had endowed the establishment, which he had not been able to visit for many months, with munificent liberality.In the second place, by general consent, the managing committee had agreed to elect a president and to invest him with the chief control of the concern, including extensive power of organisation, alteration and expansion.The earliest president thus appointed was a son of Mr Ferrie's, a man in the prime of life, of independent fortune and ample leisure as a sleeping partner in a great bank, willing to devote his time and attention to rendering the Institute a splendid success and making it a lasting testimonial to his ability, as it was a memorial to his father's liberality and iníterest in the welfare of women.If anybody could carry out in full the original intentions of the founders, and prove these to have been a magnificent blessing to one-half of the nation, it was believed to be Mr Sam Ferrie. He was a man of acknowledged talent—genius, even; he had distinguished himself at his uniíversity, and he had subsequently won honour in the perfectly distinct fields of science and history. Politics and Parliament would have seemed to be his natural destination, but the passion of Christian altruism possessed him still more than it had possessed his father.To accept the work which came most readily to his hand, and bring it to perfection for the good of humanity, was Sam Ferrie's instinct. Neither was he a dreamer whose ideal would interfere with the reality; he was the most practical as well as the most energetic of men. His fault was a certain fiery impatience and restless craving to accomplish his task and reach his goal. As he did not spare himself he would not spare the tools in his hands, and he would see no obstacle to the attainment of his purpose. Within two years of Mr Sam Ferrie's taking the reins of government at Chesnut Green the schools and workshops were doubled, the boarding and lodging-houses were increased by one-third. The variety of branches to be taught was multiplied indefinitely, and while he had introduced many new teachers and pupils, he had pensioned and dismissed scores of incapables.CHAPTER IITHE LAST ARRIVALSTHE course of instruction in the many departments of the Institute began with the New Year, after a longer or shorter period—according to the exigencies of the pupils and of the employers who entrusted them with commissions—of Christmas holidays. January—a dark, rainy rather than bright, frosty January—was well advanced when a cab from Chesnut Green station drove up to the entrance of St Catherine's boarding-house, and was in the act of depositing a couple of girls and their two moderate heaps of luggage.St Catherine's was considered one of the best of the Chesnut Green boarding-houses, owning a tariff which, though it was not extravagant, was understood to be only within the means of girls who had been accustomed to the comforts and refinements of life, whose relations were prepared to pay for these adjuncts till the novices should have completed their three years' novitiate. Mr Sam Ferrie, though he was understood to be as simple as an anchorite in his personal habits, had the sense to give human nature a little play with regard to the boarding-house tariffs, the nature of their accommodation and of their menus.But he had one stringent rule from which he would not depart. He would not permit any boarding-house to be dedicated solely to art students or to the cultivators of elegant accomplishments, though these were no longer to be practised by superficial, half ignorant amateurs.Accomplishments by the way were to be mastered from their first principle to their last deductions. The result was to be professional experts. These would sell their achievements, with or without blushes, in the highest market. The performers might, if they pleased, still call their attainments "accomplishments," just as sensitive people, compelled by the state of their finances to increase their incomes by receiving boarders into their houses, find a mild consolation and a sop to their wounded gentility by entitling these boarders "paying guests."But Mr Sam would not have a boarding-house—St Catherine's or any other—devoted exclusively to wood-carvers, painters in oils or in water-colours, embroiderers, decorators, groupers of flowers and composers of bouquets, teachers who themselves condescended to be taught—not Greek or metaphysics, but the exquisitely delicate, highly-important vocation of teaching, etc. He would not suffer a line to be drawn between the ornamental and the useful, by separating the followers of such pleasing pursuits from the copying-clerks, book-keepers, rearers of poultry, dairywomen, market-gardeners, cooks, dressmakers, nurses, etc., etc.A longer or shorter purse might be taken into account. Habits of permanently-established, excessive daintiness and fastidiousness, though they often meant the reverse of the refinement they aimed at, just as the extreme of prudery suggests pruriency, required special allowance made for them in boarding-houses and elsewhere, since the complacent maintainers of these finical habits would be rendered wretched by their subversion.All the same, Mr Sam would have none of the multifarious callings in his care dubbed common or unclean since they were all honest as the day, all more or less serviceable to the human race.Exclusiveness, caste, "shop," even if it were the "shop" of universities and studies, Mr Sam Ferrie held to be destructive in their effects. The denizens of his cluster of kingdoms should mingle freely—always with that inevitable reservation of means, personal tastes and habits, from which no man or woman can escape. If the richest girl, of highest rank in the world outside Chesnut Green, who entered the Institute preferred plain seam to embroidery, and would rather walk in the steps of a German Haus-frau in scrubbing and darning, than give a recitation, or execute a symphony on the violin, or perform a skirt dance, why, let her have her will; the one occupation was at least as virtuous and beneficent as the other. Indeed, with regard to Mr Sam's private leanings, though he was not fanatical, far less anarchical, they were understood to be all towards the useful versus the ornamental, as promoting the good of the many instead of merely increasing the enjoyment of the few—by comparison.Experience and perhaps the vagaries of this nineteenth century endorsed the sagacity of Mr Sam's conclusions on this point.It was not the cleverest or ablest, it was not even the best-born and best bred of his clientèle, his students in technical knowledge, who shirked the roughest occupations, or looked askance at the severest toil, the most prosaic drudgery.An earl's grand-daughter would have herself qualified, from the purest motives, to act as the matron of a workhouse. The niece of a Cabinet minister cheerfully took to scrubbing pots and pans as the first step in a cook's progress. The daughter of a man who was rolling in well-earned wealth, which had won for him a seat in Parliament, and an entrance into the best houses in London, desired nothing better than to become so perfect a shirtmaker as to found a great shirtmaking establishment, which should become co-operative, in a London thoroughfare.Christian altruism or humanitarianism had laid hold of more hearts and brains than those of the president. There is no end to the passionate strivings, the noble longings, the lofty ambitions and lively search after fresh fields and new sensations among the more advanced young women of the present maligned generation.But though the followers of a variety of callings met under the peaked gables of St Catherine's, the girls were under the careful surveillance of the head of the house, Miss Barret, who was an admiral's daughter. She had mixed in the great world and yet had not thought it beneath her birth and breeding to bring tact, polish and savoir faire to bear on the young people who flocked to the Institute and St Catherine's to learn, in whatever line, thoroughness, diligence, self-resource as the high road to independence and helpfulness. If, therefore, good manners were not to be found at St Catherine's, where were they to be sought for within the bounds of the Institute?Notwithstanding the fact, there was Ella Mainwaring as ready as the most pronounced vulgarian to peep from behind the window blind of Florence Fleming's room, which happened to command the front door and the drawn-up cab, so as to spy upon the travellers, and to gossip over every detail concerning them.The hardship was that the room belonged to Florence Fleming, who was at that moment practising double entry with the aid of a ledger and an account-book. She had no inclination just then to enter on the burning question of the new boarders."One of them is big, Florence, and the other is tiny. The big one is wearing a tweed frock and jacket. She has mouse-brown hair combed back under her sailor hat. The little one is in a blue serge and a fur cape. She has black, fluffy hair—not in a fringe—nothing so common, but piled up in little rolls and rings rather crushed and deranged under her hat by the journey. I wonder which is Sarah Lyster and which is Charlotte Kirby? I saw their names in this year's list of the St Catherine's boarders, which has just been hung up in the hall.""I am sure I don't care," protested Miss Fleming, not so much angrily as despairingly, "if my figures would only come right!""Oh, bother your figures! You must care," cried Ella Mainwaring, confidently. "Girls we are to live in the same house with, see at meals, and perhaps swear eternal friendship to for the next year. It may be two, three, four years if they can afford it, and go in for trades requiring a deal of preparation, or if they choose to humour the Great Mogul's fancy for thoroughness.""I have no time for eternal friendships," mumbled Florence Fleming, with her little nose and her short-sighted eyes close to the ledger and the account-book while she ran a taper finger up and down the columns of figures, "and I wish you would not call Mr Sam Ferrie 'the Great Mogul,' it is so schoolgirlish.""Which means that the wit is poor and the liberty impertinent," remarked Miss Mainwaring, carelessly. "But if nothing better is to be had—what will you? as that little French Suzette says. Do not let us subside into so many plodding ciphers. Indeed, indeed, Florence, I had no intention of making a detestable pun.""I will believe anything if you will only go away," implored Florence. "There are my entries all wrong again!""But I cannot go, my love, upon my word I cannot," explained Ella, candidly and unblushingly, "since my room looks to the back. Miss Price, who commands almost as good a view as you do, has locked her door, and there is a decided coolness between me and Miss Williams, who has also a front room, a two stair front, you know." Reproachfully, "There is no other in this wing of the house.""Wise Miss Price! Happy Miss Williams!" Florence exclaimed, with a groan."Jasper and Lydia are carrying in the luggage," went on the reporter with a mixture of immovable good-humour and stoical unconcern. "There is not very much of it. There is not likely to be "I wonder how much privacy my room secures to me?" suggested Florence, plaintively. "There are no mysteries about my toilet. As for propriety and opportunities to read our Bibles and say our prayers undisturbed, you know very well Miss Barret makes ample provision for all that with her screens and curtains. Besides, surely two girls can respect themselves and each other sufficiently to refrain from gratuitous intrusion."The last half of the speech was delivered with emphatic point, to which Ella Mainwaring responded by making a moue. She was cast in too large a mould for general espièglerie, but her eyes and her mouth had a mischievous droop; she could make a most effective moue, and she knew it."We are a big family at home," went on Florence Fleming, who was honest and matter-of-fact, short, square, and high-coloured, "and my father is not rich enough to supply us all with separate cubicles, even. I sleep in the room with the sister next me in age; I should be a humbug if I pretended I did not. More than that, Ella, I like it above all things; it is one of the treats of going home to think that Bessie and I are to spend our nights together. It is then that we tell each other our greatest secrets and ask each other's advice, and have the best of times. Why, we kiss good-night and cuddle into each other's arms when it is cold, or when we are troubled, or vexed, or very happy. If one of us cannot sleep, the other wakes up and chatters to her till she drops off, just as we did when we were children. Oh, Ella Mainwaring, it is detestable to me to hear people speak as if girls could not be nice and modest, in minds as well as hearts, unless each has a room to herself. Think of the thousands and thousands of girls as good and a great deal better than we are who have not separate rooms, and, what is more, never wish to have them.""Sisters are different," answered Ella, a little evasively. "I never had a sister," she continued with a satisfied air."Not an own sister! Poor Ella!" cried Florence, with sincere sympathy."I have been accustomed to think I was rather a favoured girl in that respect," declared Ella, quickly, in a tone which had in it just a dash of hardness and pertness; "I have been often told so, at least.""Then you were told what was quite untrue, and you have never known the loss you have suffered else you would not speak in such a manner," said Florence, bluntly. "Of course there are good sisters and bad sisters, just as there are good and bad mothers—that does not make any difference in the fact that there is nothing like a good sister, unless it is a good mother."Ella raised her eyebrows incredulously."I am afraid, dear," said Florence, gravely, "you have been in the habit of entertaining yourself by reading fast, third-rate novels, or by listening to the conver-sation of loud, unwomanly women, and of would-be cynical and blasé men."Florence Fleming was trying her best to do what was no easy matter, to speak seriously and a trifle severely to a girl of her own age—a popular girl at St Catherine'sElla was the least bit affronted and the merest scrap ashamed, but she carried off her discomfiture by protesting with pretended diversion, "What a sentimental goose it is! "What an out-of-date, preaching goody-goody, and its father not even a clergyman! It ought to have been the head of Chesnut Green boarding-house on its own account, or a lecturer on morals and domestic affections, or a Bible-woman, if the Great Mog—if Mr Sam Ferrie and the committee had included moral lectures and Bible readings under the head of technical knowledge.""One would think if they heard you that you had a quarrel with morals and did not approve of reading the Bible," said Florence, in a vexed tone, for she was extremely literal in her goodness. She was also rather fond of her tormentor, who, though she had shown herself perverse and sardonic, was naturally generous and obliging, and had a refreshing stock of fun and high spirits. Those elastic spirits were what Mr Sam Ferrie found, to his dismay, had a trick of flagging and failing unaccountably some-times, among the busy bees of his youthful côteries—was he working them too hard? did they miss something in the routine of their lives which he could not supply?"You were saying sisters could share rooms, while other girls who had been well brought up, who respected themselves, would not?" resumed Miss Fleming, returning doggedly to the main thread of the discussion—allowing herself, in the interest it contained for her, to be allured from her rows of figures. "What do you think of Miss Wentworth's giving up her room in order to take a doublebedded room along with Miss Conyers?""What?" cried Ella Mainwaring, rising to her feet and speaking in a high key."It is quite true," insisted her companion. "I heard Miss Wentworth and Miss Conyers making the arrangement with Miss Barret before I left the drawing-room last night. They were talking over it again in Miss Barret's room when I went to enter my name for the tennis club.""Why didn't you speak of it before?"demanded Ella, indignantly. "This is news. I was dying for something more to happen than the arrival of these two. Miss Went-worth's room is the best in the house, hardly excepting Miss Barret's. How could you tell that I would not apply for it at once?""It would be of no use. Miss Barret said when she consented to Delia's Wentworth's chumming with Miss Conyers that she meant to keep Delia's room as an 'occasional room' for visitors. She was not to have any more changes this term. She was afraid they encouraged a spirit of restlessness and dissatisfaction. Mr Ferrie thinks we ought to stay in the rooms which have been allotted to us for a year at least.""I wonder he does not parcel us out and lock us up,"said Ella, ironically. "He might carry away the key in his pocket over night, and let us out in the morning. Even then his mind would not be at rest as to what hour we got up at, and whether we burned the gas out of lawful hours.""He can trust Miss Barret to see to all that,"said Florence, not scenting a joke."I think it is a shame to ask a lady to play the rôle of a common boarding-house keeper,"said Ella, restively."It is her duty and for our welfare," said Florence, solemnly. "Miss Barret would be miserable if she did not do her duty. Though she is poor and openly says she is glad to have a salary from the Institute, you don't for a moment imagine, Ella, that she would be at the head of St Catherine's if she did not think she was helping a good object, and being of use to us now and throughout our lives?"Miss Mainwaring did not suppose Miss Barret was a mere hireling. Ella was petulant and daring, and was tempted to allow her sense of humour to carry her too far; but she was a gentlewoman at heart; she knew a gentlewoman when she met her. Ella yielded to none in her genuine esteem for Miss Barret. She dropped this branch of the subject and hopped off to the fascinating speculations occasioned by Miss Went worth's behaviour. "What can have come over Delia Wentworth? Has she gone off her head? Why, she and Miss Conyers scarcely know each other. I don't fancy she is doing it out of charity, or as a High Church penance—she is not that kind of girl. As for the charity, Edith Conyers has told everybody in the house that she and her friends have only consented to the double-barrelled arrangement because there was not a single room for her. (Why has she not changed rooms with Delia since she is so idiotic as to propose to move out of her delightful rooms?) Miss Conyers' family would have paid double, according to her account, to secure a single room for her, but till Delia was guilty of this extraordinary proposal and made way for an 'occasional room,' Edith Conyers' only chance lay between going into one of the other boarding-houses, and everybody knows they have a great deal more of the rag-tag and bobtail among their occupants than St Catherine's has, or in not coming up to the Institute this year. Oh, I know, Florence!" broke off Ella, in accents of exultation. "I have got the clue. Miss Conyers has a horrid, chronic night cough. She tried to make use of it to oust somebody out of her room, which she could appropriate, by strongly suggesting that she of all people ought to have a room to herself, for she would certainly disturb a sleeping partner.Poor dear Miss Barret! if it had not been for the look of the thing, or if it could have been allowed, would have willingly vacated her room. As it was she was only too sorry for the sufferer. She said she would give her, Edith, a companion who would sleep through a thunderstorm. She would have the last invention in stoves put into the room in order to keep up the temperature and for the purpose of cooking anything which might relieve the cough. There is the explanation—I could go into a witness box and vouch for it if necessary. Delia wants to test the capabilities of this particular portable stove, and to be sure that she is equal to invalid cookery at all hours of the night and the day. I hate a girl to be so soaring in her aims, and so bent on being good all round, in her calling. I hope she will not be able to shut her eyes for half the night, and that Miss Conyers will say she has been poisoned, and will attempt the dodge of sleep-walking to be rid of an over-zealous cook. If Edith Conyers is really ill, Miss Soames might practise her nursing upon her; but Mary Soames would not be cheated out of her proper allowance of sleep for all the coughings—with coffins looming in the distance—in the universe. She says it is suicidal, and when she has a berth in an hospital, or undertakes private nursing, she will stipulate for at least eight hours' sleep under any circumstances.""I think you must have misunderstood her," remonstrated Florence Fleming; "she could not be so exacting and unfeeling when people were in the extremity of suffering, or lying between life and death, with their relatives in an agony of anxiety. Miss Wentworth does not mind about sleep; she says she can wake and sleep again every hour of the night, and be as fresh as a daisy next morning."Ella made one of her moues. "I told you she was a dreadful girl, frightfully go-ahead, brutally healthy, and with not a nerve in her composition. But there is one weak spot in her harness, and I am thankful to be acquainted with it. You may have heard that she was a Girton girl, and you may have been told what her mathematics were then. Perhaps mathematics come into cooking, as I am aware to my cost they come into music. Anyhow, she keeps them up for pure love of them. They are her chosen recreation; she gives them every moment she can spare. Won't she hate when she is lying on her back, early and late, working out her problems, to be called upon to stop Miss Conyers' bark, bark, ugh, ugh, ugh!""She says she can work anywhere, in the middle of whatever is going on. I am sure I wish I were like her," reflected Miss Fleming, with a deep sigh and a conscience-stricken glance at her neglected ledger. "She laughs at the idea of people having to shut themselves up and abstract themselves from every outward sight and sound, to do even the hardest of head work. She says if that were the way with real workers, very little work could ever be got through. She tells how Mary Somerville was in the habit of making out some awful calculations in the middle of her family circle.""The monster! I have done with her!" exclaimed Miss Mainwaring, with an annihilating sweep of her hand. "Not Mary Somerville," she proceeded to explain—"Delia Wentworth.""Would you mind not using such strong language?" suggested Florence, nervously. "Suppose someone were to hear you?"I am not speaking from any personal feeling."Ella defended herself calmly. "I don't mind being disturbed, and I am the universal disturber. I go down to our College of Music, of course, for the greater part of my noisy days, but I am also obliged to have a piano in my room, and by the time I have mastered my thorough bass, I am afraid there will not be the drum of an ear left in St Catherine's, not in its normal, healthy state, I mean"There was a pause. Florence Fleming drew a long breath and made a clutch at her books. Ella Mainwaring anticipated the movement."I say, Florence, I take it for granted you know by sight that pretty Miss Millar who came to Chesnut Green in the autumn; she has been in the neighbourhood ever since, and is going to be installed in double-bedded room number one. There is a ghastly whisper that Mr Rae, the freehand drawing-master, is—is dreadfully spoony upon her. To think of it! Mr Sam's hair will grow grey in a night when he hears of such an unbecoming departure from business, such an unpardonable liberty. Mrs Grundy, I ought to have said Mrs Lundie at the Beeches Boarding-house, the nearest rival to St Catherine's, where Miss Millar has been staying, will rend her black poplin, and tear her auburn wig in confusion of face, lest she should be blamed for the indiscretion.""Really, Ella, you are too bad; you are being quite vulgar-minded and—and unkind to Miss Millar to allow yourself to say such things," cried Florence, indignantly. "I will not listen to another word. I shall do what I have often threatened, and what you will see I am prepared to do."She pulled out her purse, drew from it a carefully-stored-up morsel of cotton wool, tore it in two, stuffed the different pieces into her ears, out of which the cotton wool projected in the shape of two small white horns, and turned resolutely to her ledger and account work.Ella Mainwaring giggled gleefully, manifested in dumb show an extravagant enjoyment of the performance, and departed with ostentatious deliberation.CHAPTER IIITHE NEWCOMERS AND THEIR DÉBUT"HERE we are, Charlotte," said Sarah Lyster, cheerfully. "Everything looks well cared for and comfortable. We have only had a passing word with Miss Barret, but I feel sure she is sensible and kind, and that we ought to get on here."Charlotte Kirby did not look so sure, nor was she inclined to take a bright view of things in general. "It is all so strange and unhomelike," she said with one uncontrollable quiver of her lips. "It is such a big place. I seem to see evidence of heaps on heaps of girls and women—all so self-assured, so accustomed to the place, to their work, and to each other. They will certainly look us over the moment we come under their scrutiny. I have a notion there are terribly sharp, clear eyes behind some of these half window blinds, shrouding draperies, and empty flower boxes.""Nonsense!" said Sarah, briskly; "the occupants of the rooms have more to do. They are not idle, dawdling, gossiping girls. Each girl is full of her own business.""I don't believe it," said Charlotte, incredulously."Well, then, dear, never mind; a cat may look at a king. We have nothing to hide from them. Perhaps it is only natural for them to be curious about us, girls like themselves come to the Institute to learn to use their brains and their hands, and to live together in tolerably close quarters for years. Do you know I should not like the other girls to be absolutely indifferent to us?""They will look down on us as ignoramuses and Philistines," insisted Charlotte."Nonsense!" said brave Sarah again, "we'll soon show them we are made of good stuff."She was a bright, resolute-looking girl, not exactly pretty, for her features were irregular and her complexion—even when it had recovered from the disastrous effects of a long journey on a winter's day, was neither particularly brilliant nor specially delicate, yet it had a certain healthy freshness which matched with her expression."I'm not made of good stuff," denied Charlotte Kirby, "at least not of the stuff you mean. I think this a cold bare-bones of a room. I'm dead tired and I'm dreadfully home-sick already. To put the finishing touch to my misery I don't believe the girl who helped to carry up our luggage intends to bring us hot water, and Miss Bartlet, or whatever her name is, said we were to have dinner an hour earlier than usual, because somebody or other who could not stay the night was to give a lecture in which a number of the St Catherine's girls were interested—all a pretence, I daresay. But, oh, dear! not even our dinner hour respected, and no hot water that we may clean ourselves. Father could not have expected this, I am sure, and mother would not have suffered it.""Hush! I hear a tap," Sarah Lyster gave the warning. "There is your hot water, you sybarite."Charlotte Kirby was a small creature with fine but slightly pinched features and an air of natural grace and acquired elegance somewhat impaired by an affectation of listlessness and absence of interest in her surroundings. She exaggerated a little to conceal her discomfiture, but she was clearly timid, nervous.Sarah Lyster was under the impression that it was in her day's work to keep her young townswoman, Charlotte Kirby, up to the mark, so that she might not at once make a display of her worst points and of the serious defects of her education, thus lessening her chance of being liked and doing well.Sarah took her own method of bringing Charlotte up to the mark. "If you are tired, dear, so am I,"she said philosophically, "but I'm not going to give in the first thing I do. You call this room bare? I don't, when one considers how many rooms there are to be looked after. Rooms cannot be kept so scrupulously clean and in such good order as this is, if they are stuffed with supernumerary furniture and nicknacks and pretty things ad libitum. We are to supply these, and look after them if we cannot live without them. Besides, the girls here are expected to practise, if possible, in their rooms such branches as they have taken up in the shops and schools.""Oh!" exclaimed Charlotte, dejectedly. "That means space and the absence of all unnecessary litter, so that the necessary litter may be cleared away without difficulty.""Oh! I say," went on Sarah, "here is a duck of a copper kettle on a bracket, above the washhand stand behind the screen. We are supposed to boil water and have it handy at all times as well as to attend to our lamps and make our beds. We shall be as jolly as two sandpipers. We'll set up a couple of teapots and keep a teacaddy in that cupboard, and make believe to be two old maids living together in a garret.""I don't see any jolliness in that," said Charlotte in flat contradiction, but she was smiling a little and showing how much younger she looked when dimples came into her sallow cheeks, and when she sat up and the slightest strain of animation replaced her apathy. But presently she relapsed into despondency and moroseness. "I can't make a bed or clean a lamp any more than I can clean my boots," she protested. "Think of my hands!" and she glanced disdainfully at her dainty finger-tips. "Besides, I should certainly do something wrong. There would be an accident and an explosion. I should be blown up; possibly the whole room would be blown up.""Not with me in it," said Sarah, stoutly."If other girls can make their beds and clean their lamps, why may not we? If you cannot learn bedmaking, you yourself will be the sufferer, and why may you not acquire the art of lamp-cleaning and beat us all hollow?"Charlotte shook her head."You don't mean to plead deficient capacity, I hope; your fingers are as supple as other people's fingers, and a little pumice stone will take off lamp black as well as paint. Only think what an advantage it will be for you and me to learn to do something well, as well as it can be done, even lamp-cleaning like a lamplighter. Your father was so pleased that you should have the opportunity."Charlotte groaned. "I don't know what has come over father, he is always harping now on people being fully equipped for whatever may befall them. It is not as if I needed to work, or as if mother was not very much annoyed by my coming to this queer radical Institute and Emporium."Sarah shrugged her shoulders. "There is no question of my needing to work. It is a case of 'needs must,'" she said, with a lightness which was merely buoyant, not defiant. "Mother, you know, is a widow with an income which decreases in exact proportion to perennially decreasing dividends. Dick, my only brother, having chosen to be an artist with a period of starvation before him—he says, ere he strikes oil and paints the picture of the season, points in the same direction. I must 'smart my fingers,' as a nurse of ours was in the habit of beseeching us children to do. I must come out strong, and in place of being a drag on my family I must be a stay to them."Sarah laughed, and nodded at that conclusion, as if, like the vision of the old maids in the garret, it was a prospect at once supremely absurd and highly desirable. Then she tried a slight diversion in the channel of the conversation."You may well call the Institute and Emporium radical when it proposes to go to the root of the matter in all respects," was Sarah's most emphatic remark. "See, you will take this chest of drawers and I will have that. I cannot unpack much to-night, only the clothes which I want at once. I advise you to look sharp and do the same."Sarah was saying to herself while she spoke, "I sha'n't do it for her—that would be a bad precedent. She would not respect me for it, and it would be of no earthly use to her."At the same time, without a word or a moment's hesitation, she quickly selected for herself the smallest chest of drawers, the smallest looking-glass, the dullest half of the room, for the instinct of noblesse oblige was strong in her.Had a basket of strawberries been placed before the two, Sarah would, as a matter of course, have left the bigger to Charlotte, in spite of any attempt at protest on Charlotte's part, because to have done otherwise would simply have worried the girl, and kept her from enjoying her share of the fruit.During the next hour, before the pair had quite finished their arrangements, which Sarah was going about with energy and zeal, and in which Charlotte was playing her part resignedly and after a dawdling fashion, a tap came to the door."Who is there?" asked Sarah, lifting her head out of a box. "Come in," and Ella Mainwaring, in the demi-toilette of a last year's dinner frock, appeared in the doorway.Ella's sauciness had disappeared for the occasion, just as her auburn hair was in the demurest of coils. "I am Ella Mainwaring," she introduced herself, with the utmost politeness. "I thought you might like me to show you the way to the dining-hall. If you would like me, when you are ready, just knock at my room door—it is the third on the right—and I will come with you.""Oh, thanks!" cried Sarah, cordially. "That will be nice. It was kind of you to think of it.""Not a bit of it," said Ella, advancing a step, and relaxing a little in her tone of bland courtesy. "We never mind thanks here—we are all chums; we are friendly or we cut and snub each other as we see fit. We don't stop to thank each other after the first day. I would have asked you to have had tea in my room if I had not known Miss Barret would send it up the first afternoon. If she has not," looking round in surprise, "it is proof positive that we are all topsyturvy on account of this idiotic lecture of Mr Mills's. I see you have put out light blouses to wear. They will do very well. Ah! what a divine collar and cuffs," breaking off to apostrophise Charlotte's blouse. "Only a first-class London house could turn out such work.""It was done in Paris," remarked Charlotte, coolly."Ah!" exclaimed Miss Mainwaring again, with a quick, surprised glance at the speaker as if to ask, "Then what are you doing here?" "I must not stay talking and making you late," she said the next instant, and whisked off as suddenly as she had come."Now that was thoughtful," said Sarah, beaming. "I have no doubt there are many nice girls here, and that we may have friends by the score if we have time for them.""I think it was a trifle impertinent," said little Char, languidly, while she stretched her arms above her head. "I hate to be taken up and patronised.""I have not been much accustomed to the process," said Sarah, drily, "but apparently from Miss Mainwaring's talk the acts of dropping your friends and being dropped by them can be accomplished here as elsewhere, with even more than the usual ease—that is, if you care to cultivate the business of dropping and being dropped gracefully.""All right," pronounced Charlotte, indifferently, "and if it please you to run up friendships instead of putting a summary stop to them, it is your own matter.""Precisely," said the one of the two who was resolved that there should not be the ghost of a serious disagreement between them, either now or at any future time.It requires two to make a quarrel, and Charlotte Kirby's father had been too faithful a friend to Sarah Lyster's mother for Sarah not to bear and forbear with Charlotte, and decline to forsake her in what Charlotte persisted in regarding as a hard and humiliating exile.Besides, there was good in Charlotte notwithstanding her foibles, while some of them were a mere cloak for the girl's natural shyness and shrinking from strangers. Other peculiarities were the result of prejudices industriously instilled into her by an arrogant, short-sighted mother.Miss Mainwaring was as good as her word. She marshalled the new arrivals through troops of girls filing out of their respective rooms and descending to the dining-hall. She went up with them to Miss Barret, who received the strangers with gracious dignity. Ella introduced them to such of the girls as she con-sidered desirable acquaintances; she even contrived to change her seat so as to place herself between Sarah and Charlotte, in order to make known to them, in an undertone, all that was worth being made known about the place and people.Charlotte Kirby had brightened up considerably at the sight of the well-appointed table set out with the flowers for which the girl had a passion. She appreciated the presiding genius, still a fine-looking, unmistakably lady-like woman, in her long-lasting, well-worn, but still carefully-fitting, artistic-ally-falling Lyons silk, lace—yellow with age and worth, on her head and about her throat and wrists.The large party of girls, too, made what even Charlotte acknowledged to be a respectable appearance. They might not all have even the faintest infusion of blue blood in their veins, they might not—many of them—be altogether guiltless of a connection with trade in some form. The hand and arms of some of them were not innocent of disfiguring roughness and redness, and of stains which would not wash off at a moment's notice.These misfortunes might be the consequence of avocations not strictly improving to the texture and tint of the skin, or they might be the fruits of hockey which now holds a triumphant position among our out-of-door winter games for girls. Such games as an institution are proudly established in England, where, within less than a century, country walks for women were regarded as an unbecoming and unfeminine exercise, not to be engaged in unless as a matter of necessity. Mr Sam Ferrie gave an unqualified support to games for his subjects, and no doubt games had something to do with the inauguration and preservation of the flush of youthfulness and bloom, pleasant attributes of the assembly.The girls were seen to advantage in the simple evening dress restrained by the good taste of Miss Barret, just as she subdued the exuberant spirits of the most light-hearted of the company before care had laid hold of them, and toned them down to a decorous gaiety free from loudness and boisterousness.An agreeable spectacle was provided by these fresh young creatures (with only a sprinkling of women of mature years among them), in their last summer frocks saved up for evening wear, or their light blouses.Not the least pleasant and suggestive feature in the scene was a lady principal like Miss Barret, watching over her flock and impressing them more or less deeply with the stamp of a true gentlewoman.Sarah was edified and charmed, Charlotte was appeased for the hour."There is a verse in old English carved over the chimney piece," explained Ella. "I believe it inculcates temperance, modesty and good-will. We are not likely to be intemperate here, are we? We drink only water filtered and boiled, so that it may be free from every impurity; we do not indulge in beer even, except by a doctor's orders. We may be gluttons, to be sure—if there are gluttons on joints hot and cold, two vegetables, rice and tapioca puddings with apple fritters for a change—anyhow, if we can be gluttons I defy us to take to strong drink. Can we be guilty of levity when we are all of one sex, and does not that fact also reduce strife to a minimum?" Sarah was amused, but she could not yet make out Ella Mainwaring to her satisfaction. "Who is the original of that bust?" she inquired, looking at the most prominent ornament at the head of the room."That on the large bracket? Don't you see the likeness? It is a bust of Miss Barret; it was a gift from the old girls of St Catherine's. The new girls propose to surpass the old by presenting the house with her portrait in oils, done by a good artist.""Yes," in answer to a note of admiration from Sarah, "she must have been almost a beauty when she was young, and now of course, of course,"with roguish emphasis, "she is all that she should be. I may mention it is thought good form in St Catherine's to be enthusiastic about Miss Barret, madly in love with her, in fact. It is only the Red Republicans who dispute her supremacy, and the sneaks who speak ill of her behind her back.""Tell us about someone else,"suggested Charlotte, in the tone of one tired of the subject in hand."That is my comrade—the girl in red, two seats from Miss Barret, Florence Fleming. Isn't she solid and steady-looking? In Scotland I believe they say, as you will find in one or other of the Scotch books everybody is toiling and reading, a girl is ' solid ' when they mean she is ' sedate.' It is the best definition I ever heard. For years I have lavished my tenderest attentions and my most ingenious teasing on Miss Fleming, but I don't know that she has melted or thawed a bit. The only result is that we are sworn allies on the principle that two of a trade never agree.""You have agreed to disagree long ago," suggested Sarah."We are like the king and his son—or his grandson, was it? "—went on Ella," of whom it was said the first never said a wise and never did a foolish thing, and the second never did a wise and never said a foolish thing. Is that self-praise and calling myself witty at Florence Fleming's expense? Oh! but it is easy to be witty in contrast to dear old matter-of-fact, prosy Flo.""What is she learning?"—Sarah got in a word."As stuffy and fussy a calling as could well be devised for her. However, ' Samivel,' ahem! Mr Samuel Ferrie did not thrust it upon her. It was Florence's deliberate choice, influenced, no doubt, by a pledge given to an uncle of hers before she came here. She is learning book-keeping simple and compound—if it ever is simple and if it calls itself compound, like fractions, for instance—and she is practising it and earning money by the practice until she is "a ready reckoner," incapable of being puzzled by the most hideous piles of figures. Mr Fleming is a country doctor, but his family are clericals to the third generation, and are as poor as church mice. (We are not ashamed to proclaim our poverty in this part of the world "—with a shrewd glance at Charlotte.) "The second exception in the Fleming family is a manufacturer up in Lancashire, and he has promised Florence that if she masters single and double entries to his mind, he will give her the post of bookkeeper in his big mill.""Who is the girl in primrose colour?" Charlotte Kirby condescended to ask, her curiosity whetted a little by what she had heard."Ah! I am glad you have noticed her, for she is out of the common," said Miss Main waring, with satisfaction. "That is Miss Wentworth—Delia Wentworth—our old Girton girl.""Did she come here from Girton?" asked both girls in pleased surprise."Didn't she?" echoed Ella, with relish. "She was the crack mathematical girl of her year. She was not far behind Miss Fawcett, when all at once it occurred to her that cooking was more practical than mathematics, and just about as difficult, and that the world's food, without any exceptions worth mentioning, except what have to do with kings, dukes, millionaires, and the Carl ton Club, was shockingly cooked. Her tastes, she says, have always hovered between mathematics and cooking.""Perhaps," put in Sarah, "there is a subtle connection linking the two, like what exists between mathematics and music. It is possible that the unalterable laws of harmony may have something to say in the boiling of potatoes, the frying of fish, and the poaching of eggs, as in the working out of problems and the composition of chords.""Anyhow," rejoined Ella, "Delia has made up her mind to be an amateur mathematician in order to be a professional cook. She is studying the great gastronomical art in its logical heights and depths—from scouring pots and pans to compounding sauces and concocting salads."The girl referred to was a conspicuously handsome brunette, with power in her square forehead and distinction in her long neck."Yes, that goes without saying," chimed in Ella Main waring, as if to a statement in words which could not be denied. "Miss Wentworth is grand in her physique, but she is too grand for mortal man—or woman. She makes everybody look and feel small in her company. I believe even our excellent president and ruler shrinks a little into his shoes in her presence, and does not assert himself with her half so brutally as with other people. Our real beauty is, or will be, Miss Millar—' pretty Miss Millar'—who is dining here to-night, and is coming to us one of these days. There she is in the white frock and black ribands at the off-hand corner.""Lilies and roses, eyes like stars, a half opened bud of a mouth, hair like vine tendrils! She is pretty," whispered Sarah, delightedly."Such a baby face!" Charlotte criticised the beauty."Well, babies are about the most charming objects in creation," argued Ella, "and Miss Millar is charming. I could a tale unfold with regard to the fatal potency of her charms, but I will be discreet for once in my life. Not even with one of you on either side of me, will I venture to divulge the tale at the dining table.""What, is Mr Ferrie, our chief, smitten?" Sarah could not resist making the frivolous suggestion, though she felt it was unworthy of her and of the Institute."Not he!" cried Ella Mainwaring, with grim force of denial. "He is invulnerable to arts and darts; if it were not so he would not be our president, the managing committee would not appoint him to govern us. There does not live the daughter of Eve who could vanquish old Sam and drag him at her chariot wheels.""That is fortunate," said Charlotte, satirically."But it does not follow that Miss Millar has not other captives—poor, forlorn, despairing wretches—since love and marriage are forbidden within the bounds, and in the terms of the Institute and Emporium. The one science we are not taught, we are even forbidden to learn, while we are serving our apprenticeships and venturing on our first flights as journey women, is the science of subjugating our natural enemies."CHAPTER IVMAKING A CHOICE OF A CAREERThe first morning which dawned on the new arrivals at the Institute was of the greatest importance in their future history. Indeed, the girls were understood to select then and there their particular callings. They might have made some sort of a selection beforehand, but whatever their bent might be, and whether it were strong or slight, their choice on this occasion was understood to be final; the candidates must abide by it thenceforth, for chopping and changing were practices unheard of under Mr Sam Ferrie's réime.If any girl or woman altered her mind, she must signify the alteration by her withdrawal from the Institute. She could not possibly continue its pupil and exercise the proverbial fickleness of her sex. The rule was made for the good of the many, therefore no inconstant or impulsive transference of individual allegiance could be permitted, even when it might have benefited the special offender."Know your own mind and stick to it," was Mr Sam's motto. "If you make a mistake, suffer for it; it may be some remedy may arise out of the very suffering, but shilly-shallying and roving from one vocation to another can on no account be allowed."Just because the first step was irrevocable, that step had to be taken with great care and discrimination. The tyros were assisted in the step by Mr Sam Ferrie to a degree which certainly curtailed the freedom and independence of the actors in it. At the same time it did more to secure the success of their aspirations than any influence short of the most fervent original inclination could have effected. His knowledge of human nature and experience of the subjects in question were great, and they were put fully at the service of each aspirant.The preliminary proceeding was the repairing to the gentleman's office—an ordeal, in which the novice was generally accompanied and supported by Miss Barret or any other authorised sponsor—when she was put through a searching examination ere she was launched on her path.On the memorable January morning when Sarah Lyster and Charlotte Kirby ran the gauntlet of many curious and amused eyes, the unwonted experience was sufficiently trying to prompt them to stand at bay. They were conducted to Mr Ferrie's sanctum in what had been the original manor-house of Chesnut Green, standing in a conveniently central position in the middle of a "congerie" of red-tiled buildings of all shapes and sizes, from the high dome to the low shed.There was a certain picturesqueness lent to the buildings by their irregularity, and by the fact that their lines and angles were broken by one or two well-grown chestnut trees left judiciously as a relief to the eye, and as a token of the time when one country house set in chestnut trees had given the name of Chesnut Green to the whole locality.The weather had improved. Instead of the ungenial rawness and depressing muddiness of the previous afternoon there were a clear blue sky, an air tingling with frost, and a fresh sprinkling of hoar-frost glittering under the beams—cheerful even in midwinter—of a morning sun falling on red roofs, brown branches and grey pathway. The prospect was not unattractive and not without its exhilaration in the very act of taking the bull by the horns to Sarah Lyster, who was ready to seize every good omen and make the best of it.Mr Sam Ferrie's office was the former business room or business closet of the house, and was not larger than sufficed to hold an oak writing table laden with memoranda and business papers, a heavy round-backed chair on castors, so that its occupant could wheel himself round and face an applicant in the twinkling of an eye.There was also a high stool on which sat a towsy, white terrier dog, Mr Sam's usual attendant—Ella Main waring and girls like her called it his familiar spirit—and a bench carved and stuffed, "for the look of the thing," the same glib tongue pro-fessed, on which the client and her supporter were expected to seat themselves.There were two clients to one supporter on this occasion, but luckily the supporter was Miss Barret of St Catherine's, who was equal to every emergency that called for well - bred ease, quickness of resource, thorough womanly tact and as thorough womanly earnestness and good-will to each neophyte.Moreover, Miss Barret and the great man seemed on excellent terms—those terms which need no bolstering up of ostentatious urbanity or overdone cordiality to bear witness to their soundness. Only a quietly pleasant "Good morning, Mr Ferrie. Allow me to introduce to you Miss Lyster and Miss Kirby, who came last night—I am glad of the nice morning for them, as it is their first day at Chesnut Green."Good morning, Miss Barret; good morning," a comprehensive good morning including both the girls, as he rose and bowed the invaders of his privacy to the bench. "So you have faith in first impressions, but we don't want fair weather recruits," to Miss Barret.The next instant he sat down opposite the trio and looked business. He had much on hand. His time was not to be trifled with. With a sudden alarming pounce on Sarah he said, "May I ask what profession or trade you propose to go in for?"He was tall and spare, with a dash of grey in his thick hair—worn not long by any means, but longer than the convict fashion, enough to allow of a wave of hair which was generally pushed back from a capacious forehead; but in moments of acute provocation it could be—we do not say torn out in handfuls, yet certainly vehemently dishevelled by irate fingers, till it stood on end—not in one but in a collection of bristling tufts.His nose was neither remarkable nor aggressive, a tolerably straight, broadish nose—a common-sense, one might almost suggest a reasonable, nose. His mouth and chin were clean cut under their moustache and beard, and, without having a fine point put upon them, showed strength and sagacity. It did not detract from either the strength or the sagacity that the lips under the moustache were frequently a little apart with a watchful, waiting expression, in a willingness to listen and a readiness to speak.But the peculiar benevolence of the man, which tempered the keenness of his temperament, was to be found in the shape of the head and in the eyes, tenderly humane, fervently kind even when they flashed with anger.His brown coat was in an advanced state of shabbiness, his neck-tie was a disordered wisp, his clumsy boots were made by the village boot and shoemaker, because a certain part of them was the work of women in the Institute. However, his linen, which was also cut out and stitched by the shirtmakers and washed and dressed by the laundresses in the establishment, was the freshest of the fresh.He was as unmistakably a gentleman, in the true sense of gentle breeding, as any peer of the realm or prince of the blood. The unobtrusive but inherent and radical culture of mind and heart was one of the qualities which gave him his power over the womankind, gentle and simple, in his kingdom, and helped the most high-headed and headstrong of his subjects to endure, though not without restiveness, protest and ridicule, his brusqueness and what they styled his tyranny.Sarah was so taken aback by the abrupt plunge into the heart of the matter that she could only look across at her examiner with a gasp.Her eyes, which were not saucer eyes, took a saucer shape, nay, a fishy aspect. She had the air as if she had never given a moment's thought to this vital and crucial point of the undertaking on which she had entered.On the contrary, she had been dwelling on it in anxious anticipation and turning it over in her mind with a pertinacity which tended to dizzy bewilderment every day, almost every hour, for the last three months."Oh! I have done a little painting—flower painting, I mean," stammered Sarah. "My brother is an artist—learning to be an artist, that is—and I had hoped, I have thought that I might be trained, might be taught to train myself, under necessary guidance, to make my living in the same way."Sarah had never made so limp and disjointed a speech in her life before. ''What an idiot I must seem," she reflected, and he did appear to think her a hopeless idiot, for he closed that receptive mouth of his, knit his broad brows and half turned away."Have you brought any specimens of your work ?" he inquired presently.Sarah was carrying a small portfolio under one arm. She unfastened it with trembling fingers, and took out one or two sketches in water-colours and in oils. Oh, what trouble she had taken with these sketches! How often, in what various moods of hope, doubt and despair, she had looked at the daubs—as she believed they were now. What consultations she had held with her brother and his friends on which were the best and the worst.The arbitrator of her destiny at Chesnut Green dismissed them with a single glance.It is hard to say whether it would have been a comfort or an additional pang to Sarah if she had been made aware at that moment that Mr Sam Ferrie had himself painted and painted well for an amateur, and that he possessed more technical knowledge of painting than half the picture-dealers in the kingdom."Are you acquainted with the fact, Miss Lyster," was his next significant observation, while he flung down the pen he had been holding and thrust his hands with an emphatic, half-disgusted gesture into his coat pockets, "that very few women, few men even, earn a decent livelihood in the side walks of art? You had better propose at once to be a curate—the Church is another genteel, poverty-stricken calling—if the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Court of Arches will allow you.""I don't think this is a question of gentility, my dear Mr Ferrie," said Miss Barret, with the smiling suavity which resembled oil thrown on the ruffled waters.It was a little old-fashioned, but it was reassuring to a scared, mortified girl, particularly as it did not imply that Miss Barret entertained a grain of fear of the gentleman who had possessed the appointment to her post, and by whose will and pleasure she continued to hold it."Miss Lyster has just told us that her brother is an artist," explained Miss Barret. "What can be more natural than that she should wish to follow in his footsteps and share his pursuits, if possible? Perhaps there is a family bent to art.""Not in the past," interrupted Sarah, with quick honesty. "My father was a captain in the navy."("Oh! then, my dear, you and I have been launched from the same stock, and you have an additional claim on me," Miss Barret murmured half under her breath.)"My grandfather was in the merchant service."("Still seafaring," Miss Barret muttered again, with an approving nod.)"My mother's father was a clergyman. I think—I am sure—Dick, my brother, is the first of us who has drawn more than a chart or a plan for a cottage or a pigsty," with a nervous laugh."Then be so good as to dismiss him from the discussion," said Mr Sam Ferrie, with gloomy decision. "I have no doubt you have sat and watched him painting and listened to his theories and fancies, and those of fellow-idiots—artists, I mean—until you have dreamt that you, too, could paint. You must imagine nothing of the kind, I tell you." Sarah's face fell."You have not an artist's head—you have not an artist's fingers," looking sharply at hers as he spoke. "If you have any artistic faculty it is nebulous and undeveloped, and will probably take a generation or two to bring it out to any purpose." Sarah hung her head still lower."You are like the people who love literature, and think because they love it nothing will be easier for them than to write in their turn. Pen, ink and paper, a little leisure, and just a trifle of pains will see them full-blown authors, covered with renown and rich as Croesus. There never was a greater, more pitiable, more disastrous delusion." Mr Sam Ferrie looked at once savagely wrathful and full of infinite compassion."I cannot plead guilty to being one of those silly people," declared Sarah, roused by the sweeping nature of the charge, piqued into recovering her composure and into making a modest attempt to defend herself. "I have been a good deal in my brother's substitute for a studio, and have listened to him and his companions. But I was not so presumptuous and foolish as to think I could do even what they did after years in the art schools. It was only that I seemed—they thought"—her voice faltered a little as she proceeded to record her humble but apparently absurd and untenable aspirations—"I had an eye for colour and a little taste in some directions.""No doubt, I don't deny it," growled the censor, partially propitiated, "and that was enough to put you and your friends wrong.""I was under the mistaken impression that I might be taught to compose and paint a flower-piece, an interior, some bit of still life—the crumbs of art-work which lie on the threshold of art."He shook his head."I should have been quite proud and content if I could have done as much as that, and at the same time kept myself and been a help to mother," finished Sarah, unable to keep the tears from starting to her eyes in her crushed and crestfallen condition, though she would have died sooner than let the tell - tale drops of moisture fall.Miss Barret nodded again approvingly.Charlotte Kirby tapped with her feet involuntarily. She positively scowled her indignation at the rudeness to which her friend had been subjected.It was just what Charlotte would have expected from a mongrel trade institute like Chesnut Green. It was only fit for a lower class than that to which she and Sarah belonged. What could have possessed her father that he should have set his heart on her going there? How could her mother have been brought to consent to it?The presiding spirit of the place glanced again at Sarah. He did not leave off scolding, but the scolding was much more pacific, and had even a tincture of remorse in it.''Flower and fruit pieces and still life be hanged!—if you will forgive me for speaking my mind. What am I here for, save to tell you the truth ? Such work requires as much art as battle scenes call for. It demands a Fantin or a Hunt or a Lance to do it justice." Sarah was too crushed to dispute the assertion."Looking at the thing in a commercial light, which, after all, is a sound and practical light, such work would not furnish you, unless a miracle were to happen on your behalf, with salt for your broth," he insisted."Did you ever hear of the old semi-charitable, semi-pauper Repositories, I believe they were called—the only provision made formerly for indigent gentlewomen?" Mr Ferrie resumed.She had heard of them, Sarah admitted faintly."They made pincushions, needle-books, pen-wipers and kettle-holders, and carried them to these Repositories of trash and odds and ends, trusting that good, rich Christians would give an exorbitant price for the paltry wares." Mr Sam Ferrie enumerated the wares with withering contempt, and then paused to let his words sink deeper. Presently he began again, more gently."Poor souls! poor, poverty - pinched, proud-spirited, broken-down souls! Now the very thing which we wish the Institute and Emporium not to be, which it must not be, is a substitute for the old Repositories. It is not a refuge for the destitute; it is a school for honest hard workers of every description, where they may master their crafts and go out into the world to claim as a right independence, nay, affluence. Why not ?" he demanded, though nobody was contradicting him."Why not, indeed?" echoed Miss Barret."Art taught in the Institute," he began again, "is genuine art, born with the artist, tingling to his finger-tips. It may aspire to nothing higher than Christmas cards to begin with, but it will stop at nothing. It will set the Thames on fire in one branch or another. We will have no husks of art, no trifling and playing with art here. We will have real art, however humble, or nothing."Sarah was half heartbroken, regarding herself as out of the contest, till the dictator turned to her again."An eye for colour and good taste are excellent things both. You are well off if you possess them, but you must carry them to some other quarter, where they are not such mere tools and accessories to the main qualifications, of which I see no signs in you, as they are in art.""Miss Lyster, you must excuse me for putting a question to you," he addressed her afresh, looking her full in the face. "You will believe me is it not prompted by idle curiosity. In fact, I put it to every woman who desires to make use of the Institute. Are you actuated by necessity or as a pure matter of inclination in proposing to join our classes? Do you mean to work for pleasure, for personal credit, simply for the benefit of your fellow-creatures, or for wages?""For wages, from necessity," replied Sarah, without an instant's hesitation. "In any case I should not wish to be a drone in the human hive, but in my case I am obliged, and it is my hope to contribute my share to the family income.""Good!" said Ferrie, approvingly, his brow clearing; "we'll suit you and you'll suit us, I have little doubt. We must look about and make farther inquiries to find your line."CHAPTER VA FRESH ENCOUNTER"Miss KIRBY"—Mr Sam turned in a flash from Sarah to Charlotte—" what is your aim in entering the Institute? What do you regard as your career in life ?""I cannot say that I have an aim, or that I propose to myself any career," Charlotte had the boldness to answer, half in sullenness, half in covert mischief. "I am that contemptible, out-of-date being, an ordinary young lady. My father sent me here, and here I am. If you do not think me, with my empty mind and frivolous views, fit for this excellent institution, and decide on sending me back to where I came from, I am afraid I shall be only too thankful, for I shall perfectly agree with you that an emporium of trade's goods is not in my line."If Charlotte had calculated on creating a grand sensation by the well-bred effrontery of her speech, she was doomed to disappointment.True, Sarah stood aghast, and cried,"Oh, Charlotte!" and Miss Barret raised her eyebrows and exclaimed softly,"My dear!" But it was in the tone of a woman of society and experience, who knew exactly how much weight to attach to a girl's revolt; and being aware how slight a thing it was, could not resist taking a little amusement out of it.As for the Great Mogul and bully, as he could be on occasions, he was not able to restrain the twinkle in his eyes, or to expel the quizzicalness from his voice when he said,"Ordinary young ladies are good for something, though, ain't they? You would not slander them by robbing them of what used to be considered their elegant accomplishments? What are yours, pray?""I have none," said Charlotte, beginning to be abashed in the defiance which some-how fell flat."Oh, Charlotte!" Sarah Lyster protested again in an excited undertone. She was not only the person most scandalised by Charlotte's outbreak, she felt responsible for her, and could not keep quiet and hear her disparage herself—probably ruin herself in Mr Sam Ferrie's estimation."Who can group flowers like you? I could only hope to do it by taking great pains and being well trained, but you have done it since you were a child, out of your own head; it comes natural to you."All the thanks Sarah got for her championship was a glance of disgust from the rebel.The head of the Chesnut Green Institute looked over Charlotte with the eye of a general as he had inspected Sarah, ending by saying coolly, "We shall see. In the meantime, Miss Barret, don't you think it would be as well for your students to take a bird's-eye view of what we are doing?"Accordingly, Mr Ferrie picked up his soft felt hat, which was not in any better condition than his coat was, and prepared to escort Miss Barret, while the two girls walked behind the couple, in a rapid survey of the place."The horrid wretch!" said Charlotte, in a choked voice."I daresay his bark is worse than his bite. He showed more forbearance than you deserved, my dear," Sarah found her-self forced in common justice to say.What did the strangers not see of work and classrooms of every description, running up and down the gamut of occupations conventionally genteel or confessedly homely, but always with the purpose of securing for women remunerative employment, whether in the culture and diffusion of beauty, or in the rendering of the plain but indispensable services without which civilised society cannot exist?There were veritable studios, at which Sarah looked with wistful, regretful longing, while Charlotte would not deign to let her eyes rest upon them. There were woodcarvers' ateliers and photographic rooms. There were music-rooms, so built that each kept its sounds to itself, in which violin and piano playing and singing went on all day long.There was a miniature dramatic college, in which two actors of some eminence, retired from the stage, trained many of the players of the future.There was a nurses' home, which included a dispensary and a drug-store, besides a cottage hospital, presided over by the resident medical man of the Institute, in addition to the matron of the home. Here nursing and massaging in all their details, together with so much of the science of medicine as could be imparted either prior or subsequent to the students' attendance at a university, were given to embryo medical women.There was a great restaurant, in which much of the cooking for the Institute was done, and cooks in every stage were acquiring the culinary knowledge and skill which were not heaven-born in the aspirants.There was a crêche in connection with the county poorhouse, in which infants were reared and nursemaids were taught how best to rear them.There were washhouses, a drying-green and laundries, in which the clothes of the dwellers in the Institute were washed on the most approved principles and as many young washerwomen and laundresses as would consent to be instructed—like their neighbours of higher degree—were trained.There was a creamery, which received and dispensed the produce of a dairy farm in the immediate vicinity, where butter and cheese-making were taught.There was a large dressmaking and millinery establishment, which was understood to clothe all the students who desired to have their hats, bonnets and dresses made and trimmed on the premises, as it were. This establishment, like many others in the Institute, had a metropolitan centre, which furnished it with materials and entrusted it with outside work to do. One well-known Court modiste's business supplied its Chesnut Green apprentices with patterns and "fashions."There was an art embroidery quarter where needlework in its fine mysteries was brought to perfection, whence issued sumptuous hangings for civic halls, and wrought draperies, silk curtains and quilts for the grand drawing-rooms and state bedrooms of palaces, halls and castles, together with the daintiest work for Church vestments.There were shops and rooms where as much of printing and bookbinding as are entrusted to women were learned, and where typewriting and typewriters were specially attended to. There was a library where a variety of nourishing food for the mind was to be had, and where unfledged librarians were inducted into the methods and duties of their office.There was a hairdresser's, where women dressed the hair of female applicants, kept children's heads in order, and wove such wigs as are again in request. There was a watchmaker's where women manufactured and managed the small machinery. There were rooms set aside for straw-plaiting, the cutting out and stitching of gloves.There were large rooms for lacemaking, even spinning and hand-loom weaving, in recognition of the fact that there are indications of a return to some of the older industries, with an acknowledgment of the truth that although these are, and must be, largely superseded by manufactories on a great scale, still the old individual industries, pottering as they may have been called, were not without advantages which entitle them to a certain measure of revival.There were decorators' shops from which new things in tiles and panels were constantly issuing, and florists' shops from which many choice bouquets were sent up to kindred shops in London.There were versions of the potteries where earthen and china ware were in the process of moulding, painting and baking."It is wonderful," murmured Sarah Lyster, with glistening eyes. "It is worthy to be the monument of a public benefactor.""It is like an industrial exhibition, save that it has no specialty," remarked faultfinding Charlotte. "One expects to be dragged down against one's will to an earthy underground gallery full of horrid fumes of iron, oil and smoke, in order to be introduced to a few steam engines, or to be shown some such engaging operations as those of rope twisting or riband weaving.""But all machinery and manufactures are interesting," declared Sarah."Not they. How I have hated them from a child. How I have been bored to death with museums and exhibitions—' The Fisheries,' 'The Health' and the rest of them. Big shows like 'Venice' and 'Constantinople' were only a little better. Well, it is queer to come and live in one with the noble object of becoming myself an exhibitor in due time!"As the girls were being conducted round the showrooms of the dressmaker's establishment, Mr Sam Ferrie kept the group waiting for ten minutes that he might speak to the head of a department.The three women improved their time by examining and indulging their admiration for an assortment of stuffs and fabrics of the most exquisite hues and of the richest and most delicate materials.Miss Barret was short-sighted, and she had been in the habit of contenting herself with ordering her gowns and mantles from the tradeswoman who had always supplied her, taking for granted that she would do her devoir by a constant customer, and would not fail to provide her with what was suitable and becoming for the outward woman. The head of St Catherine's soon tired of blinking at the beautiful stuff before her, and turned in preference to the human element in the showroom, in which she took a never-failing interest.Charlotte Kirby soon began to suppress a yawn; she was familiar to satiety with such scenes and surroundings as the showrooms furnished. She was still tired with the journey of the day before, and she was more than fretted by the strangeness of the situation.But Sarah could not see enough of the gossamers and brocades, with their shifting effects of colour. She handled them tenderly, caressingly. She folded and refolded them that she might bring out their tints. She let them drop from her fingers as an example of the lines in which they ought to fall.Presently Miss Barret told the girls that Mr Ferrie, whose time was beyond price, had brought the interview, in which he had been engaged, to an end, and was ready to go on to the florists'.There Charlotte Kirby roused herself to accuse one of the assistants, with lively indignation, of "torturing" a cluster of hot-house roses, and a little later at the potteries the same Charlotte commented severely on the flowers on a china plate in which the daffodils were maize and not amber colour, and were holding up their heads instead of hanging them down.There was more to be seen, but Mr Ferrie took the party no farther than to the copying clerks' office, and the office for book-keepers, in which Florence Fleming was at work.The same evening Sarah and Charlotte received each a succinct note, worded in nearly similar fashion, from Mr Sam Ferrie."I recommend Miss Lyster to take up millinery and dressmaking.""I recommend Miss Kirby to choose bouquet-making and table decoration.""You had better take his advice," said Miss Barret, persuasively, when the notes were submitted to her. "Mr Ferrie's recommendations have generally proved judicious and sagacious to a degree, and so are next to law in the Institute. No doubt they are sometimes hard to accept, but they mostly answer in the long run. He has so much more experience than any newcomer can have, and he has a perfect genius for knowing what everybody is fitted for."Both girls accepted the decision, Charlotte with professed indignation, but really with a sense of relief and even some latent satisfaction—she had a passion for flowers, and floral decorations were a labour of love to her.Poor Sarah had to fight down sundry pangs of disappointment and mortified pride. What would Dick and Valentine Cheyne say? Not that Dick had ever ventured to predict for her great things as a still-life painter, though he had liked to have her dabbling beside him in his little studio. What would her mother think?Only a dressmaker? Sarah might have been that without the trouble and expense of coming to live at the Chesnut Green Institute for two or three years—though, to be sure, Miss Barret had just mentioned to her that young dressmakers and milliners, if they showed any capacity for their trade, were paid for their work after the first year.That was an advantage which Sarah was too sensible and unselfish to undervalue, while she had enough experience of art in Dick's case to know it was uphill work.Certainly, first-rate dressmaking was far more likely to pay, and it was an honest resource of which it would be no disgrace to avail herself. Still, she might have been apprenticed to her mother's dressmaker in the country suburb, within easy access of the city of London by railway, from which Sarah came.It was true Sarah and her mother and their set did not count their dressmaker among their acquaintances. When she was like that dressmaker must she give up visiting her old friends? Charlotte Kirby's mother would fight shy of her. Must she slip down into a lower grade of society when she took up her trade?Sarah had heard of aristocratic firms of dressmakers in London; but these were entirely out of her line, or of the line of the natives of a quiet suburb—old-fashioned in spite of its nearness to London.Sarah Lyster was able to sew creditably, though needles and thimbles had gone out of fashion, and she believed she could learn to work a sewing machine as easily as any of the thousands of girls who worked such machines. She did not dislike sewing, and lovely stuffs and graceful patterns were undeniably to her taste, though she could have wished she had not shown it so plainly as she had done this morning.She had heard that dressmaking, even with the aid of the sewing machine, was great drudgery. But she had said that she would not mind drudgery, and she had always believed, as she was thankful to remember, that no honest work could degrade the worker.Dick and Sarah's mother and some other people were sensible, just as she herself had a little sense, Sarah hoped. Here at least in the Institute she would not be looked down upon for learning dressmaking as a trade.Miss Barret, who had claimed kindred with Sarah as a naval officer's daughter, had accepted the arrangement for her without an instant's demur. Doubtless there were other girls as well born and well bred as she learning dressmaking in this topsy-turvy Institute and Emporium, in a world growing always more topsyturvy."A stout heart to a stey (steep) brae"—that was the motto of her brother's friend, Val Cheyne, who was Scotch on the mother's side. And Sarah had thought she had a stout heart. She had meant to be an example to Charlotte Kirby.CHAPTER VI"THAT DETESTABLE MR SAM!"MR SAM FERRIE was too wise a man and too much up to his finger-tips in the laws of health to propose all work and no play for his colony. On the contrary, one of his most autocratical ukases, from which there was no exemption, while it was as much rebelled against as were other of his rules, was that at least two hours of every afternoon should be set aside for recreation.To render this practicable there were not only a covered-in gymnasium and a large hall in which indoor games could be played, there were play-fields in which tennis, hockey, cricket even, with golf and croquet for the older and lazier members, had been fully established. There were quarterly matches between the different boarding-houses, etc., etc., which received every encouragement from the commander-in-chief.It is difficult for any section of the community to be instructed and improved. The operation is never wholly agreeable to the persons operated upon; and it is still harder for the operator—however well disposed and however gifted with the ruling faculty—to give general satisfaction.There was no exception in the case of Mr Sam Ferrie. The facts that the malcontents were his clients and retainers, that they were much obliged to him and his council (though the women were neither paupers nor pensioners), and that they all belonged to the weaker, the more thinskinned, and, without partiality, the less reasonable sex, did not detract from a tendency to grumble and find fault. On the contrary, the items just summed up aggravated the popular tendency.There was therefore an undercurrent of murmuring and complaining perceptible in the air of the play-fields on an afternoon in February when, although the sun was shining and the light broadening, the wind was in the east and only rapid movement could prevent fingers and toes from being pinched blue by the cold.There was a good deal of active exercise going on; a young and eager band were flourishing their sticks and pursuing the ball of discord at hockey, amidst much clamour about minding the rules of the game, with continual appeals to the Captain of the games—a dapper little figure in a scarlet skirt, brown jacket and Tam-o'-Shanter cap, who was gallantly bearing the burden of a great responsibility.In a railed-off section were the tennis courts, in which more girls and women were brandishing bats and causing balls to fly to and fro.In a kind of "Row"preserved all round the fields, bicycle riders were in full career, when they were not sustaining ignominious falls, racing against time and each other.Notwithstanding, there was a considerable residuum of cloaked and veiled figures who marched about and made believe to look at and criticise the players and racers, in order to ward off chills and get rid of the time set aside for recreation.Ella Mainwaring had sprained her wrist the day before, and so was out of count for either hockey or tennis.Delia Wentworth had come late and found the various sets formed, so that she had to wait for the formation of new sets.Sarah Lyster had played for half an hour, but had found that the running here and there, and striking frantic blows at a flying goal, rather increased than diminished a slight headache, so that she had been glad to find a substitute and withdraw from the game, in order to try pacing up and down in the fresh, cool air as a sedative for throbbing temples.Charlotte Kirby openly declared her hatred of games, which she said ought to be left to boys, and declined to be initiated in such rude pastimes.Florence Fleming had come out late, like Delia Wentworth, but was conscientiously seeking to walk herself into a glow. These were a tithe of the loiterers hanging on the skirts of the players.It suddenly occurred to Charlotte Kirby to observe that the scene, apart from the games going on, was not unlike that of a jail yard, while she and her companions figured as shivering wretches of prisoners taking exercise according to rule."It is little you know of such places, Charlotte,"cried Sarah, forgetting her head-ache in her determination not to be a party to a libel. "We are here of our own accord, and although it is better for us, as I am sure you know, to pass some part of the day in the open air, we might if we chose have stayed in our rooms, or found some light reading in the library, or gone into the hall and played battledore and shuttlecock.""Or ball or skipping-rope,"suggested Charlotte, maliciously."Well, then, 'ball or skipping-rope,' why not? Either would have set our blood in motion. As it is, you are not shivering, Char; you are looking quite fresh and blooming.""You had better say at once like a beetroot or a peony,"protested pale-faced Charlotte, with an expressive glance at the blowsiest of the heated players."No! not that it would matter if it kept you well and sent you in with an appetite for four-o'clock tea. But you have only a pretty pink tinge in your cheeks, which I never saw at home."Charlotte turned her shoulder on the speaker."It is all very nice to say we may keep our rooms, or go to fetch light literature from the library, or play hall games,"broke in Ella Main waring, "but public opinion is against us. Miss Barret thinks we should be out, and reports us to King Samuel. We look pale for a day, or own to a headache as Miss Lyster does, and we are threatened with our Institute doctor and tonics.""There is very little choice given us,"chimed in Charlotte."There is no fire in the hall on account of the beastly games,"resumed Ella. "Our private stock of coals has waxed low in the scuttle, while we are politely requested not to waste fuel, the truth being that our fuel will hardly suffice to boil our kettle for a cup of cocoa should a friend drop in, or to afford a glimmer of light to help our candles when the gas is turned off at ten o'clock.""We may as well perish with cold here us there."Charlotte executed her part in the duet."It is more honourable to face the worst. Who is it that says or sings the worst turns the best to the brave?"All the time Ella was ignoring the fact that but for the sprained wrist, which she had got in a superabundance of zeal at the last hockey match, she would have been in the thick of the combatants, running and shouting shrilly with the best."I might have had such a nice long afternoon at my ledger," said Florence Fleming, plaintively. "I am convinced I could have cleared up these entries which won't come right and are troubling me dreadfully, and that I might have caught up and made an end of those seventeen shillings, ninepence halfpenny which have broken loose, will not settle themselves, and are a perfect nightmare to me.""And I have a decided impression that to have been allowed to go back to the workroom and rectify the sleeve which I know now I put in wrongly, enough to give Madame Bathilde a fit, would have done my headache more good than any amount of open-air games could cure it. How can I have the heart to play, even if my head would allow me, with that miserable, misplaced sleeve unpicked?""And how can I be expected to give myself to tennis, even if there was an opening for me, with seventeen shillings, ninepence halfpenny weighing upon my mind?" chimed in Florence, quite seriously."You young geese!" cried Delia Went-worth, unceremoniously, suddenly turning upon her companion.Delia was not above a couple of years older than the youngest of the four whom she thus addressed from a superior standpoint of age and wisdom.It was not because of her Cambridge tripos and of the "honours" with which it had been won; it was not because she was a bigger woman by the head and shoulders, physically, mentally and spiritually, even than Sarah Lyster; far less was it because she was the best born and the richest student at the Institute that she took her stand; it was on the ground of these two years' seniority and of the wisdom which comes with age."Do you wish to have accounts and dresses on the brain? Do you mean to break down ignominiously and to be sent home ticketed 'failures,' dilapidated objects fit neither for the Institute nor for life in your families?""I am sure I don't," muttered Florence, while Delia held on,—"I should be sorry for you still more than for your friends. Do you care to have meddling critics and pessimistic censors point out that Mr Ferrie has been wrong in his estimate of women, and that they cannot stand the strain of the most ordinary men's training in technical knowledge any more than in university work?""I was not blaming Mr Ferrie," put in Sarah, conscience-stricken."Are you willing to serve as warnings that the test is even worse for girls of the middle classes—more or less educated girls—than for girls of no education—the dullest, most stupid working girls— because the last are thicker skinned, are not so easily stimulated or worked up by emulation, and have less sensitive consciences (save the mark!)?""Oh, I say!" from Ella."Or is your aim to be specialists crammed with one subject and densely ignorant, and, what is worse, disgustingly useless, where every other is concerned?"When Delia Wentworth spoke to girls they were accustomed to listen, in spite of her having turned upon them. She was so much in earnest, so fearless and candid, so big a creature mentally and morally. Besides, was she not a distinguished mathematician in the list of the wranglers, and had she not left her distinctions behind her for the purpose of becoming a cook in the Chesnut Green Institute?"I daresay you are right," said Sarah Lyster, shamefacedly, though she need not have been shamefaced in her openness to conviction, and her readiness, not only to confess herself in the wrong, but in her haste to amend her error."Of course I am right," said Delia, with decision. "There, that set is finished, and I must help to make up the next, but I'll rather stay out with you if you ask me to prove you in the wrong.""You horrid girl!" cried Ella, who had begun the complaints. "You are only less detestable than Mr Sam. What do you think he has done now? Sentenced me to go on studying the higher mathematics that I may understand the laws of harmony. He says you cannot have the best music without recurring to mathematics for illustrative evidence. Music and mathematics indeed! As well connect sermons and strawberries.""Never mind, Ella; come to my room and I'll coach you in mathematics," was Delia's generous proposal. "And don't think, Miss Lyster and Miss Fleming, that I fail to realise your difficulties.""Have you difficulties?" asked Florence, incredulously."Listen. This morning I was deep in two important and interesting problems—the one was to raise bread on a new principle, and the other was the trial of a soufflé which I invented last night as I was looking out at the moonlight. Can you imagine my sensations when, not more than ten minutes before the bread should have been taken from the oven, and just as I had whipped up my last egg for my soufflé, clang went St Catherine's dinner bell?""I know, I know!" exclaimed Ella, her hands on her ears."I had to put a stop to my operations on the instant and make the best of my materials—wasted, I fear. Of course it was I myself who was to blame. I had miscalculated the time I should take, and had to suffer for it. I deserved it, but the suffering was there all the same. These were private experiments of my own—not exercises in class—so that I had to take my place at the table with the others, since discipline must be preserved before all things.""That detestable Mr Sam!" ejaculated Ella."No, I will not have you call Mr Sam Ferrie 'detestable,' Ella. He is our chief, our champion, our best friend, who is dedicating his time and strength to us. It is disloyal; it is base to disobey and thwart him. The people must be faithful as well as the leader. No great movement was ever carried out without ungrudging trust on both sides."As Delia spoke with sparkling eyes and heaving breast the other girls looked at her doubtfully, half inclined to be infected by her eager partisanship.Charlotte Kirby forgot to shrug her shoulders.Ella Mainwaring's glib tongue was silent for once."Do you know the last thing he has done for us?" continued Delia, with a fine enthusiasm. "He has bought with his own money more land here, and is going to have it laid out in a large market and flower garden—twice as large as the manor-house garden which was sacrificed to our buildings long ago.""How good of him!" murmured Sarah."He thinks that some of us may take more kindly to gardening than to out-of-door sports. A joint-stock market and flower garden might not be a bad enterprise for one or two of us, while we might acquire the necessary skill and knowledge in the Institute."Charlotte Kirby pricked her ears, but the next instant pretended not to be listening."And I happen to know," insisted Delia, "that in order to make the purchase he has sold his only hunter, on which he used to ride to hounds when he gave himself a rare holiday. He has also sold the beautiful Cuyp which artists came to see, that he brought from Italy when he was a young man."The audience stood impressed and abashed.""There is Mr Sam Ferrie crossing the farther end of the field." Florence Flem-ing broke the silence with the appropriate remark.Ella Mainwaring recovered the use of her tongue. "Speak of angels and you will feel their wings," she said demurely; "but, by-the-bye, is there not another mode of expressing the same sentiment ?""Oh, Miss Wentworth, may we not give him three cheers?" cried "pretty Miss Millar,"who had joined the group. She was an impulsive, warm-hearted young person, with a number of brothers who had early inoculated her with boyish ways. They sat wonderfully well on her soft, tender individuality. "If we had been boys we would have cheered him till we were hoarse; why should we not though we are only girls ? I am sure we are all the more indebted to him on that account.""You are right there."Delia nodded her head emphatically."So few men think of girls who are not related to them, and so are not in a position to bring them credit or discredit, unless as partners to dance with, or to chaff and laugh with," declared Florence Fleming. "They don't care what becomes of us afterwards, unless, perhaps, of that one of us whom they mean to marry. But as for the rest, who may be ever so poor in these hard times, men don't mind about us; they don't trouble as to how we are to earn our living, or what struggles we have to face and pass through. They only think of us as in the way.""Mr Sam Ferrie minds and troubles; he does not think we are in the way," maintained Miss Millar, with innocent triumph. "He is like a father to us," Miss Millar declared."Well, perhaps, not to all of us."She corrected herself as she thought of Miss Sykes in the dressmaking department, who was forty if she was a day. "But he might be a youngish uncle or an elderly brother. Oh, do let us give him a cheer!"And being but girls after all, they suddenly rose in a body to the achievement, and lifted up their youthful voices in a tumultuous, promiscuous, "Hurrah, hurrah!" "Long live Mr Sam Ferrie!" "Prosperity to the Institute and the Emporium and to their last enterprise!" "Success to the market garden!"Even Delia Wentworth was carried off her feet and joined in the tribute to the President, who was taken aback and astounded."Tut! tut!" Mr Sam Ferrie said to himself, as lie turned round with a red face, took off his hat and bowed in response to the demonstration. '' What children women—young and old—are after all! But how they must have wanted this garden! Is it a return to primitive human nature with them as it is with old men—retired tradesmen and professional men who, as Cincinnatus did with his sword, lay down their scales, their lawyers' briefs, their doctors' drugs, and seek their Utopia in growing cabbages and potatoes and forcing grapes and melons ?""But I hope my 'vanities,'" Mr Ferrie reflected on second thoughts, "whom I am seeking to nurse and train into habits of self-reliance and enterprise, will not rush, too many of them, like a flock of silly sheep, into the one line, with the danger of swamping it."CHAPTER VII"PRETTY MISS MILLAR"THERE is an old saying, more graphic than elegant—"It is ill taking out of the flesh what is bred in the bone," and there is a witty French proverb to the effect that, "If nature is sent out at a walk, she comes back at a gallop." Shall we cry, "Hail! eternal law?" or shall we moan, "Alas! eternal law?"There was a great deal of human nature, of feminine human nature, in the Chesnut Green Institute. It woke up to the old thrilling touch, the old subtle influence; nay, not content with demoralising one girl, it extended like a current of electricity, which refused to be insulated, in all directions, infecting, disturbing, engrossing the mass of the recipients. It unsettled them for the concentrated attention to their work which was expected from them.Only a few made a languid effort to resist the encroaching, exciting, overpowering enemy to all stern devotion to their tasks which had come among the workers.The news spread in the intangible, magical fashion with which native news is said to flash like lightning through Indian bazaars.Who first called attention to the fact nobody could tell, though, so far as Sarah Lyster or Charlotte Kirby were concerned, they had an early hint of it from the lips of Ella Mainwaring; but in a week every boarding-house, every dweller in every lodging-house on Chesnut Green, was cognisant of an electrifying piece of intelligence.The mischief had to do with the freehand drawing department attended by a large number of girls, because freehand is not confined to art proper, but is of use in nearly every branch of decorative work, including the decoration of the body by embroidered articles of dress.The head of the department was a Mr Colin Rae, a grave and even "blate" Scotchman, young for his thirty years."Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon," Mr Colin Rae was discovered to have fallen desperately in love with "pretty Miss Millar," who was strongly suspected of returning the tender passion.It was roundly asserted that, though Mr Colin Rae was upright in his madness, and did not neglect more than he could help the whole huge class hanging on his ministrations, the recurring minutes he bestowed on Miss Millar were filled up with furtive glances, low-spoken words, violent starts when the culprits' hands or heads came in contact, and shamefaced recoil from the encounter.The result was that Miss Millar's drawing did not progress more than by half-a-dozen strokes in the hour, and those strokes had been so often rubbed out in pitiable agitation, that the entire cardboard was in a smudged condition which was a disgrace to be seen.All this passed under the troubled, amused eyes of Miss Barret and the disgusted nose of Mr Sam Ferrie, who had vowed that marriage and giving in marriage were not to be so much as mentioned by the students so long as they remained in the Institute. They were to be held as much apart from such idle and destructive ideas as those of love and marriage, while the girls and women were still in their business apprenticeships, so to speak, as ever were the vestal virgins.Now the thin end of the wedge was introduced, and what was to be the result? Ella Mainwaring was neglecting her mathematics and harmony, and was going about humming some wretched doggerel she had composed for the occasion. The other girls were weak enough to stop and listen, giggle, and, what was a thousand time worse, blush in sympathy."Where is the maiden in practice weak,Whose feats of work are hard to seek?"So ran Ella's audacious, unscannable parody."Who will melt the ice in her master's veins,Till generous manhood grips the reins?Where is the man who knows how to laze,The dandy, the masher of Philistine days,Who will bravely woo a strong-minded mate,And dare her to shirk the common fate?"Charlotte Kirby was snapping and scoffing at everybody and everything in a style which it pained Sarah Lyster to hear. All the more that she knew what had changed a girl's wholesome heart to gall long before Charlotte came unwillingly to the Institute to arrange flowers on sounder principles and to greater perfection than—even with her genius in that line—she had ever been able to do before.Poor, vulgar, third-rate Miss Fensham, who had, nevertheless, a talent for miniature painting, pricked her ears, and announced that the great defect of the Institute was about to be rectified. The place would be quite bearable—and she must admit that she was getting on with her miniatures till she would soon be a dab and an Al at her business—if each girl was allowed to have her beau and there were as many marriages made up as there were classes and certificates given at Chesnut Green.Every day in the play-fields and the gardens, which were being laid out, the players and embryo gardeners fell into preoccupied groups and set themselves with eager tongues to discuss the affairs of pretty Miss Millar and her infatuated admirer, instead of sending hockey and tennis balls skimming hither and thither, or by making their first attempts at wielding a hoe, or a rake, or a tape-line."If I were the two turtle-doves I should not wait to be expelled; I should elope and give us something to talk about," cried Ella, almost dancing with delight at the wild proposal.But in place of red-handed rebellion, Minnie Millar was conscious she had incurred the deep displeasure of the authorities and had practically disgraced herself. She would mortally offend her uncles when her folly should be known. They were the guardians of herself and her brothers in their orphaned and dependent condition, and had sent her to the Institute in the hope that she would exert all her energies and relieve them of the burden of a girl on their hands as soon as might be.Farther, poor Minnie was led to believe that she had ruined the prospects of Mr Colin Rae, who had been only too good and kind in caring for her.Yet, if it was to be all gone over again, the shy pleasure of feeling that he noticed her more than the rest, that he saw everything she did, the gratification of being helped by him, the brief, fitful confidences, the sense of a blissful understanding between them, would pretty Miss Millar turn her back upon it?She had to confess to herself, hanging her head with the lovely pale colour of the hair which was like ripe barley in tint, the pink cheeks which waxed rosier and rosier under her secret, and the blue eyes which were the hue of the summer sky with the dew beginning to fall, creating a mist of love dreams and fond longing—not of sorrow—that if she had to reencounter the ordeal from the beginning she would face it.She would find herself incapable of with-holding the faintest, gentlest, maidenly encouragement from the man who was as modest as she was, and yet, oh, so ardent!For he had contrived to show her that in spite of his modesty and his desire to be faithful to his employer, to the Council represented by Mr Sam Ferrie, and to the rules of the Institute, he was burning with ardour. So Minnie would be guilty of repeating her part of the offence with a heart singing for joy in the midst of its trembling, yes, whatever came of it.Under these conflicting emotions pretty Miss Millar did not think of eloping even if Mr Colin Rae would have suggested the compromising step. Yet, what she did do was on the whole less sensible if it was also less rebellious.She was a delicate, nervous girl, and she was seized night after night with fits of hysterics. These increased the abnormal mental condition of St Catherine's boarding-house, and drove Miss Barret, with her wonderfully well-bred self-control and wealth of resource, to her wits' end.As for Mr Colin Rae, he was poor. If he lost his excellent situation at the Institute he would have sufficient difficulty in maintaining himself; he could no longer hope to save money, set up an establishment and marry the object of his affections.He could not resign and leave Miss Millar, not only forsaken by her lover, but doomed to bear alone the condemnation which the two had incurred.He felt he was playing a double part, knowing as he did Mr Ferrie's sentiments and the rules of the Institute; he was accepting the rôle, of a Judas if he continued vainly trying to mask his feelings and leading the whole house astray.The situation was desperate. Had Colin Rae not been a canny Scot governed by good sense, and by much more than good sense—by well-grounded religious principles—it would have been no wonder if he had been found some fine morning hanging from one of the chestnuts which gave the green and the Institute their name.It was high time for Mr Ferrie and Miss Barret to hold a council, and such was held in strict privacy in Miss Barret's private sitting-room between coffee and prayers."This is a pretty kettle of fish in St Catherine's," said Mr Ferrie, crushing his felt hat viciously and bending his brows grimly when he had taken his accustomed seat opposite Miss Barret in her corner of her couch."It is," she answered laconically, while, for the life of her, she could not repress a twinkle of her kind, reasonable eyes."That idiot Rae, I thought he was to be trusted," growled Mr Sam Ferrie, "and that monkey Miss Millar—why, I took her to be as simple as a child.""Most men and women are idiots and monkeys once in their lives, in certain circumstances," said Miss Barret, enigmatically."They sha'n't be so here," cried the gentleman, vehemently, almost violently, for he was a passionate man by nature and his life was a necessary despotism. "I won't have it. The Institute shall not be turned into a marriage market, a theatre for idle flirtations and foolish, ill-considered engagements. The whole aim of the place would be ruined. No good would come of it. All the care which has been bestowed on it would have been thrown away.""I agree with you in the light in which you see the matter generally," said Miss Barret, quietly.Her quietness provoked him a little. He had the greatest respect for Miss Barret and faith in her. He disliked a distrustful woman or man who made a fuss over whatever happened to disconcert her, and saw everything in the worst light.Still, he was annoyed that this misadventure should have happened in connection with Miss Barret's boarding-house, the most highly-esteemed on the Green, and that she should take it so calmly.He was tempted to relieve his mind by invidious generalisations. "There! if this had occurred in a community of men, unless they had been monks, not a tithe of the harm would have been done. A man minds his own business and is not dragged away from it and driven out of his wits by his neighbour choosing to play the fool with some silly girl. He may shrug his shoulders and have his jest, but there the matter ends. He does not lose his head and feel an insane inclination to follow suit.""Not always," said Miss Barret, demurely"But," went on Ferrie, "bring a wretched love affair within miles of a society of women and they will forget everything else for the extremely doubtful gain of hunting it down, flinging themselves into the breach and copying the evil example.""It is our nature to, I suppose," answered Miss Barret, too much amused by his heat to be in any danger of feeling offended by the sweeping charge."The greater reason for sitting on the egregious weakness and crushing it out at once," he asserted tartly."May I make an observation, Mr Ferrie?" suggested the lady, suavely."Of course you may," answered her antagonist, stiffly."Then I would venture to say that I am not sure whether the measures you propose to take to crush out the weakness are as wise as your other measures, for instance. You have heard that love laughs at locksmiths," remarked Miss Barret, boldly."In this way. Do you think tabooing a subject—absolutely prohibiting its natural discussion—is the best plan for setting it aside or making it die a speedy death? Is it not more likely to call attention to the question, to provoke resistance and revolt, especially when the question has to do with the lamentable weakness of my sex?""Oh! I daresay I'm a dolt of a man, pursuing my object in the clumsiest, least promising fashion," confessed Mr Sam, suddenly collapsing, as was his wont when he saw himself in the wrong, and showing his repentance for having gone too far."But, for mercy's sake, Miss Barret," he began again, "take pity on my masculine stupidity and ignorance, and let me see how we can most effectually put a stop to this sentimental nonsense which is disorganizing our students and disqualifying them for the legitimate end of their stay at Chesnut Green.""What will you say to me, Mr Ferrie, when you heart that I have a good deal of sympathy with the sentimental nonsense?" asked Miss Barret, with a comical semblance of alarm for his answer.He was equal to the occasion. "I am bound to pardon it in a lady who stands up for the privilege of her sex, nay, who experiences charitable pity for us men in our needs and deprivations." Mr Sam Ferrie bowed brusquely. Miss Barret returned the bow with laughing grace. "But, Miss Barret," maintained the gentleman, "you will agree with me that we must have everything at its proper time and in its proper place. The season of tutelage or apprenticeship and a scene like that of the Chesnut Green Institute and Emporium offer neither the fit time nor the fit place for billing and cooing and making up marriages. If that is not conceded, two vital interests will clash, and both will come to grief. Better wind up the business of the Institute and shut up the Emporium before we arrive at such a conclusion.""Perhaps you are right; indeed, to be honest, I fear there is no doubt you are right," granted Miss Barret, with reluctant candour. "There is an old saying that marriage, like death, breaks terms, with the inference that love is paramount over all other considerations."Mr Sam shook his head in a vigorous negative."I am afraid," admitted Miss Barret, "that the proverb must be taken with a pinch of salt nowadays; yet, if you only knew how refreshing I find what you call 'sentimental nonsense' after the other kind—the intellectual and worldly nonsense—I am often condemned to listen to, you would make allowance for me.""I do," he said briefly."You are a sensible man as well as a clever man," she continued, "an old friend and chief with whom I have worked in harmony since my first connection with the Institute, and I am not afraid that you will misunderstand me.""I do not misunderstand you, and I trust you do not misunderstand me," he said, with a comical air of carrying the war into the enemy's country. "You are aware, I hope, that I have not the slightest objection to love and marriage in the abstract; though, no doubt, these young people around me regard me as far gone in cynicism and bachelorhood." Then the Great Mogul set his face like a stone and thundered his ultimatum."I simply set my face against love and marriage under cover of the Institute, whose members ought to be otherwise occupied. They will be spoilt for the tasks they have come here to master if they give way to distracting influences.""And I, who am much farther advanced in the ranks of spinsterhood than you can claim to be in the ranks of bachelorhood, tell you frankly that it is a relief and a restorative to me to come across a genuine, honest love affair, even in the Chesnut Green Institute!" said Miss Barret, boldly.The listener groaned."An attachment like that between Mr Rae and Miss Millar, however reckless and hopeless it may seem," insisted Miss Barret, "is a positive treat to contemplate after what one has been forced to hear of the sorry, selfish stuff which many girls retail in this the end of our century.""What do they say?" inquired Mr Sam Ferrie, with imperious curiosity."Oh! that they must have a good time to themselves before they give themselves away. They must take care not to barter their freedom and lessen their chances of independence and distinction without a sufficient equivalent—that is, a clear return in wealth or position or some other equally doubtful gain.""Can lovely woman stoop to be so vulgar-minded and so selfish?" he asked ironically."Indeed she can," she answered sadly; " and there are free-and-easy engagements which have replaced the old sacred trothplights, and mean next to nothing at all in the present generation—at least they do not necessarily mean cleaving to one person and exchanging marriage vows with him. A girl may have been half a dozen times engaged, and in place of feeling ashamed will boast of her fickleness. All the bloom is rubbed off her heart and conscience before any engagement has its natural termination.""There must be men of the same mind," asserted Ferrie, "else girls with advanced ideas, as they imagine, poor things! would not be able to defraud the opposite sex of the better part of their rights." He still spoke satirically."You may laugh at me or sneer at me, or reckon me not worthy to fill the post I hold," declared Miss Barret, "but I confess to you I would a thousand times rather have two blessed simpletons like dear little Minnie Millar and young Rae, with their heads in the air, their hearts all right and their feet in the common, dusty highways of life than I would have girls such as Ella Main waring.""What is wrong with Miss Mainwaring?" he demanded quickly."Oh! nothing very particular. Ella is by no means a bad example of the style of girl she represents, but she makes a mock at everything," she said slowly. "Then there are girls such as Charlotte Kirby. In her twenties she regards the world with undisguised contempt as a used-up pandemonium. Can you guess what has soured a young creature like that?"He was silent."She was brought up with false pretences and hollow assumptions on nearly every side of her; and the person who might have opened her eyes and converted the devil's falsehoods into God's truths was the falsest of all. Oh! it is pitiful to think of it, with the sun shining golden and the grass springing green day by day around her, and the moon and the stars lighting the darkness in the sky above her."Miss Barret stopped short, and Mr Sam Ferrie leant forward towards her and said gravely, "Miss Barret, you did me wrong to imagine I could laugh or sneer at you or undervalue you. On the contrary, I honour you. I have always had the highest respect for you, and I never had a higher than I have at this moment."She smiled up at him gratefully."And now," with an entire change of voice and manner, "what the dickens are we to do about that young rascal Rae and that pretty baby Miss Millar? We cannot have them overturning all our arrangements and playing ducks and drakes with the fortunes of their neighbours, who will certainly not become more expert in their callings because of the time the women are disposed to waste on this precious pair's philandering.""Expel them," said Miss Barret, calmly. It sounded like a lack of consistency in reference to her recently-expressed views and to Mr Ferrie's expression of respect for her judgment. It showed also a want of consideration for him in his dilemma, since the proposal could not have been made seriously.Mr Sam Ferrie puckered his broad brow again. "To suffer, not to say to encourage, them to marry would be to establish a horrible precedent.""Horrible!" echoed Miss Barret, with the corners of her mouth twitching."Rae could just manage to keep a wife in the simplest way if he got a house—say a house in the village—in addition to his salary," said the President, tentatively."You could not ask him to marry her," said Miss Barret, hastily. "Miss Millar—guileless as she is—would not like that; no nice girl would. Besides, her uncle might object.""As they wish us to see her provided for without any further drain on them, it would be only needful to broach the subject to Rae; the fellow has made sundry desperate advances which I have nipped in the bud. The whole thing is so undesirable, so unheard of," lamented Mr Sam."So unheard of," repeated Miss Barret, meditatively, contemplating the pretty rings on the fingers in her lap."I'll take care in future that every teacher is a married man and a grey beard," said the gentleman, with grim determination.''Ahem!" Miss Barret allowed herself to clear her throat. "I think I have heard there are no fools like old ones.""A general libel in which there is the merest grain of truth—although I am not sure, my dear madam, that you and I might not, at the present moment, be considered cases in point.""Surely not; surely nobody would be so unfair," objected Miss Barret, with a cheerful laugh."I don't know," answered Sam Ferrie, ruefully; "it is a censorious world as well as a mad one. If we two make a match between Rae and Miss Millar, who have neither of them a spare penny to rub the one against the other, I am not certain that we have not given the world some ground to go upon.""I will take the consequences," she said fearlessly."I say, Miss Barret," he remonstrated once more, "don't let us endanger our characters as wiseacres, and lend two unhappy young people a shove on the downward path, without some certainty that we are serving our neighbours by our sacrifice. Can you furnish me with an assurance that this absurd ferment will die a natural death when Rae and his flame are dispatched?""Of course it will," she told him."It is true," he replied, "when the pair have sunk into a humdrum young couple with the whole of their small minds set on making both ends meet, they will not be fascinating. I have always understood that when poverty—nay, even when the jog-trot of everyday life comes in at the door, romance, if not love, flies out at the window. I believe the ridiculous glamour of the position departs with the carriage and pair which conveys the bride and bridegroom to the nearest station.""No, no, you must leave a little lingering glory for the honeymoon. Seriously, I daresay you are right, but you must allow a little time for the extinction of what some people would call the only light—not wholly of this world—which bursts on our vision, once upon a time, between the cradle and the grave.""You are romantic, Miss Barret." He made the accusation simply to be in the argument. She was not put out."In confidence, if it is the true light, I cannot conceive that either poverty or matter-of-fact cares will extinguish it," she went on. "But whether the reality or an imitation, there is little wonder that it dazzles—not merely the principals—but the lookers-on for a bit. You must give us poor women a little time to recover our equilibrium. You must be prepared for some smouldering mischief and a few relapses.""I shall do nothing of the kind," said Mr Ferrie, giving an energetic denial to the supposition, as he rose and began walking up and down the room. "And there is to be no nonsense of a marriage in the Institute—no, not even in the parish church here, with the whole place in a crazy flutter for a week and more. No, indeed! the culprits must retire to London and stay the necessary time for having the knot tied there, in the next vacation. What a pity that it wants three weeks till Easter! Could the pair be bound over to keep their secret and make no farther sign in the interval? Good heavens! what is that?" He stopped short in dismay.That was a distant, half-stifled wail, followed by a clatter of glib tongues and a patter of light feet, in the corridor without, hurrying to the rescue.I am afraid," said Miss Barret, turning aside her head, "it is poor Miss Millar having one of her little hysterical attacks."This won't do. Something must be done instantly," cried Mr Sam Ferrie, positively gasping with dismay. "We'll rather have a special license and end the disorder on the spot. The girl will lose her wits. The whole place will be turned into a bedlam.""Listen to what I propose," Miss Barret soothed him. "I shall, with your consent, take her up to town tomorrow to the house of her married uncle. She is quite ill enough from the strain on her nerves and feelings, poor child! to serve as an excuse for the step. But the sooner you can furnish Mr Rae with carte-blanche to follow her and present his credentials to the family, the better for her peace and her speedy restoration to health, I suspect.""Thanks, a thousand thanks!" he cried, wringing her hand. "Women always know what is best to be done in these circumstances. I knew I could depend upon you, and you may depend on me where the beggar Rae is concerned," and he hurried away.Miss Barret looked after him, smiling. "There goes a good man, kind and merciful at the core, under his rough rind," she thought to herself. "He would have made an excellent husband and father, and reared manly, honest boys and womanly, modest girls if Providence had not found other work for him to do. Yet, I grudge for Sam Ferric what he has missed?"'The sweet, sweet love of daughter,0f sister, and of wife.'I don't grudge what I have missed for myself. I prefer some memories on earth and restitution in heaven to any makeshift of a substitute here."Miss Barret's thoughts drifted away to some passages in her own life. Presently she called them back."Men are not like women. Men cannot live and be content with memories and hopes which can have no fulfilment in this world. Besides, I never even heard that Sam Ferrie had suffered any loss or disappointment where his affections were concerned. I suspect he has always been too busy and too unselfish to think of himself, while I would have all—the best of all that is—for the man who is old enough to be my mature nephew, if not my son.""But there"—Miss Barret dismissed the subject—"I must go and call a love-sick lass to order—think of a love-sick lass in the Chesnut Green Institute!—for theCHAPTER VIIIAN ENTHUSIASTCOLIN RAE and Minnie Millar had been, as Mr Ferrie expressed it, "dispatched" for nearly two years. They were two old married people in their own and their world's estimation.They were settled in the most humdrum way, on a narrow income in a cramped, commonplace little house, without even the sentiment of a cottage shrouded in ivy and roses, in the village of Chesnut Green. They had enough to do looking after their small ménage.The interest in the two felt by the outside world had almost died out. As they were a respectable young pair—quite unlikely either to break the public peace by a violent quarrel, calling for the intervention of third parties, or to shock the public morals by the husband's eloping with a drawing pupil, or the wife with one of the curates in the parish—it was most improbable that the Raes would create another sensation in the course of their joint life.Rae continued to teach freehand drawing in the Institute, and in his anxiety to cover any lack of economy in his wife's inexperienced housekeeping, he was not only his own gardener and house-carpenter, he exercised a talent he had for wood-carving, and gave lessons in that and in drawing at odd hours in the neighbouring country houses. He was one of the most prosaically, unromantically, deservingly industrious of men.No doubt he had once dreamt of witching the world with noble paintings, but now he was happy to be able to add a score of sovereigns to Minnie's purse by drudging unremittingly and uncomplainingly as a hack drawing-master.Why, old Crome was nothing better than a drawing-master, yet he had found time in the end to leave some work behind him which the world would be sorry to lose to-day.The girls in the Institute, especially those in St Catherine's Boarding-house, did not desert or cut Minnie at once, because she could talk of little else than the price of butcher meat and groceries, and how hard it was to make the most—to make anything indeed—of a young maid-of-all-work. But they dropped off one by one, till only a few staunch allies and Miss Barret were left.Sarah Lyster and Delia Wentworth were among those allies. Sarah and Delia spent as much time as they could spare striving to induct Minnie into the first principles of dressmaking and cooking.But Minnie had a strong inclination for cheap, trumpery finery, and a rooted persuasion that her Colin liked to see her smart. With regard to cooking, little as she knew of it, she was disposed to be conceited as to that little.Of course a married woman and a house-keeper, who had a servant to direct, must know a great deal better practically how to roast, boil, and fry, how to make stinging mustard and keep butter fresh and sweet, than a mere girl, however clever, such as Delia Wentworth was.Delia's knowledge was all theory, or else it was theoretical practice on so large a scale that it had no private and individual application; whereas Minnie's was the rapidly-accumulating experience of a young matron who had a husband's tastes to study, and an ignorant servant's deficiencies to supplement. These girls at St Catherine's knew nothing of an ordinary household.Minnie, however, never refused to profit by Miss Barret's advice. She was never conceited and self-willed to her, though Miss Barret was a single woman, and Minnie enjoyed the enviable promotion involved in a husband and a house of one's own. Not the most youthful aspirant in St Catherine's listened to its head with more genuine deference and faith than Minnie listened, which showed that she had a good deal of sense and heart left, though her head was a little turned.For it must not be supposed that Minnie minded much the mass of her old acquaintances turning their backs upon her. She was too happy to care, though she made not a few bungling mistakes in her management, and occasionally Colin Rae lost his temper and bounced out of the house in disgust at some special discomfort inflicted on him.On the other hand, sometimes Minnie was tempted to think that Colin's Scotch prudence and thrift degenerated into Scotch scrubbishness.These were only passing clouds in the sky in which true love, with perfect trust, was the sun. The little house in the village of Chesnut Green was a snug and sure refuge, a pleasant, natural home, even in its worst moments. These were when Minnie had forgotten to order an early breakfast for the master of the house before he set out to give an early lesson; or when she had spent the money which had been laid aside for the tax-collector on an elaborately-constructed refrigerator which refused to act.In St Catherine's there were still many familiar faces as well as many new ones. Sarah Lyster was entering on her last year in the Institute, and Charlotte Kirby was in the same position. Under the influence of constant congenial occupation, at once seductive and stimulating, Charlotte was stronger in health, and sweeter in spirit, than she had been since her early girlhood.Delia Wentworth was another third year girl, whereas Ella Mainwaring's term of apprenticeship had expired; but she was retained as a journey woman, a junior teacher of music in the Institute. Ella went about uttering vivacious sayings on the privilege of teaching the young idea how to shoot, especially when the young idea had a faulty ear, and all her fingers were thumbs. Yet her pupils liked Ella and made progress under her, which proved beyond contradiction that her bark—that bold, challenging, ridiculing bark of hers—was worse than her bite.There had been considerable attainment achieved by all who were not foredoomed failures in the contest, and Mr Sam Ferrie had reason to be satisfied with the progress of what was peculiarly his own and his father's good work.Not that he was satisfied; nothing would content him short of perfection, which is not to be met with on this earth. He went about shaking his Jupiter head, charged with indignant and wrathful thunder, and pouring forth a torrent of reproaches, well-nigh ugly snarls on the first luckless, lazy, incapable wight who crossed his path.Then he would be horror-struck and abashed by his own violence. He would take the most anxious, well-considered steps to give the delinquent another trial; or, if this was not advisable, to recommend her withdrawal from the Institute, in which she was getting no good, on which she would bring discredit.He would, if she was a poor girl, surreptitiously send her a cheque from his private bank-account to cover the expense of her removal. He would take pains to discover and lay before her any opening in another career in which she might be more successful than she had been at Chesnut Green.He would even try, in an awkward way, to smooth down the outraged pride and Vanity of better - class girls, though he would by no means exempt them from the same drastic treatment he dealt to the others.The two most promising candidates of the third year, on whom his expectations were centred, for whom he had the highest hopes, were Delia Wentworth and Sarah Lyster.Delia Wentworth had always been a creature out of the common, with an ele-ment of distinction in all she did, as if she were destined to great ends.Her enthusiasm in the culinary art was as unquenched and unquenchable as ever. By it she was to do her part in elevating and rejuvenating the bodies of men, women and children, especially of poor men, women and children. At present they were fed principally on underdone vegetables, over-drawn tea, alum-whitened and dried-up bread, sodden dumpling, and half raw or half scorched bacon. In consequence of under-feeding, the men especially were driven to beer and gin as a solace for their misery.And still Delia found her recreation in pure mathematics and in working out solutions of problems which had baffled learned professors. Her answers filled the pundits with admiration and envy, and made a way with their modest signature—"D. W."—into the greatest British and foreign journals devoted to such sublime conundrums.Delia would not fail the Institute unless the body which contained her indomitable, benevolent spirit, by some tragic fatality, gave way.At present Delia's comely body, like Delia's gifted, generous mind, was, so far as human judgment could decide, sound as a bell. She was far too wise, far too serene, too untouched by that feverish desire to excel, which is caused rather by the cravings of conceit than by the larger ambition, which is the infirmity of noble minds, to tempt Providence by defying inflexible laws in riding the goodly forces within her rough-shod to destruction.Delia took as reasonable a care of her excellent health in allowing herself requisite sleep, exercise, rest and recreation, as if she had been on the verge of losing that health, or had never had it to lose.She did not lock the door after the steed was stolen, or attempt the thing by fits and starts, sit up till three o'clock in the morning to-day and go to bed at ten at night to-morrow, loll in a wicker easy-chair with a novel for the play-hours of one bright, breezy afternoon, and on the next, which might happen to be damp and muggy, sally forth and play round after round of tennis till her limp arms were ready to sink by her side and her soaked feet to totter as they walked.Delia locked the door of the laboratory in which she was studying the chemistry of food, and closed her mathematical books when the time was over for studying them, with, perhaps, a lingering sigh and a few minutes' absence of mind, but with unfaltering decision.Delia was a girl in a thousand, for whom, and for her crossing his path so as to illustrate his aims, a man like Sam Ferrie was bound to return thanks.Sarah Lyster had long got over her small mortification at not being suffered to constitute herself a third-rate artist. She had gone heart and soul into her millinery and dressmaking. To her they had become not so much a fine as a great art, and quite as much a beneficent as a remunerative career."I love beauty," Sarah would say, "and I have beauty in texture, in form and in tint, where I am sure it was given to us to be loved. But there is something higher than beauty, though I believe real beauty and it are one and the same. That is fitness, suitability, truth.""Hear! hear!" a flippant audience would cry."Oh! how nice people would look," Sarah would go on, "what a harmonious outer world it would be if old and young, rich and poor, were all alike dressed suitably according to their age, according to their means and station, according to their occupation.""Amen!" Ella Mainwaring would pronounce sonorously."That is what I should like to have," continued the unmoved speaker; "and it would be a great revolution, a transformation scene worth all the changes of fashion which have ever been inaugurated. Changes, of course, there would be, changes which every round of the seasons would bring, changes every invention of a new material, every introduction of a new employment, would carry with them in their train.""I am glad you allow us a change or two," said Charlotte Kirby.Sarah nodded cheerfully, and still aired her views."An altered mode of living would produce alterations and modifications of stuffs and styles, but there is no reason why they should not all be sensible and fit. The mad monstrosities of fashion in balloon sleeves, giant hats, dwarf bonnets, crinolines and high-heeled shoes would be seen to be the deformities they have always been, and would vanish forthwith."It is to be feared that Ella Mainwaring quoted not quite under her breath, ''Go it, ye cripples, crutches are cheap.""Then the fatal habit of perpetual, miserable, incongruous imitations and copies, when all else is unequal and out of keeping, would die out. I have heard a great decorator say that a house could be furnished for an owner whose income ranged from three thousand a year, and that another house could be furnished for a tenant whose annual earnings did not amount to three hundred, and yet each house in its different way might be beautiful, designed for use, comfort and the delight of the eyes.""I should like to see them," muttered a sceptic."If people," ended Sarah, earnestly, "would only believe that and apply it to the clothes they wear, as well as to the houses they dwell in, a simple cotton or woollen gown might hold its own with a stately brocade, not to say with a cotton-backed satin.""It is for you to teach us, Sal, and I don't envy you the task," Charlotte Kirby would say half incredulously.Sarah hardly heard her; she was so full of her own side of the question. She would urge again, "What is the real argument, the true explanation in the constant lamentation over the decline and disappearance of a national dress for the peasantry of every country and climate, and the substitution in its place of the poorest, often the most grotesque version of the dress of the upper classes with its common Parisian origin? I can tell you, for I have thought and heard a good deal on the subject.""Tell us, Sarah; we are all interested in what you are going to say," said Delia Wentworth, in a tone of intelligent interest. She put down her cup, for the gathering was at one of the girls' "cocoas," and rested her chin on her hand—the better to look and listen.CHAPTER IXVISITORS"WELL, in the first place," Sarah concluded her homily, with intent yet modest conviction, "the reason why the departure of these peasant costumes leaves a loss to be seriously regretted is not merely because they were artistic and picturesque. The costumes embodied, as a rule, the experience of centuries, and, amidst some absurdities, were sensible in the main, according to the varying circumstances in which they were worn. The stuffs, even the slightest of them, were made to last. They were warm or cold, floating loose, or confined close according to the exigencies of the time, the place and the wearer.""Are you sure of that?" inquired a would - be wit, a good deal in the style of an undergraduate at commemoration."I think so," answered Sarah, with quiet good-humour. "The very picturesqueness of many of the dresses—a veritable, not a fictitious, picturesqueness—had often to do with their reasonableness in these respects. Indeed, indeed, we have made a great mistake in trusting our dress not even to our mothers and grandmothers, but to foreigners or to more or less uneducated, underbred workwomen who may have a glimmering of intuitive genius, but are without the knowledge and culture which balance and refine the genius.""I think you are right, Sarah," declared Delia, "though, I am afraid, you are not sticking to the point, but are wandering a little wide of the mark, and may presently be guilty of personalities," with a glance at Charlotte Kirby's empire gown."I was going to say in relation to the main thread of your discourse—national costumes," went on Delia, " that I believe the dropping them entirely and the craze for every woman's dressing like one above her in station, with the necessity of accommodating the supply to the demand—cheaper goods to emptier purses—have a great deal to do with the deterioration of our manufactures and the flood of shoddy materials which is filling and bringing disgrace on our markets.""And I was going to say, though very likely I am speaking irrelevantly, that I don't care how great are the names of modisites, as they choose to call themselves. Their principal claims to merit are those of singularity or elaboration, or tropical gorgeousness, or dainty exquisiteness pushed to morbidezza and faint sickliness, with a pretence of taking stock of our figures and faces as if we ourselves and our friends ought not to know their capabilities better than any man milliner of them all. The oracle says, after a single glance, what will become us, not what we will become, while he extracts golden guineas by the handful from the pockets of his credulous victims.""Is this child presuming to attack the shade of the great Worth, or the formidable personalities of his successors?" cried Ella Mainwaring, in a tragical aside."I am ashamed of my race and my generation," persisted Sarah, roused to ride her hobby-horse in full career. "I do not say of my sex, because many men aid and abet these malpractices, and speak or write with rapturous approbation of 'well-dressed women,' meaning generally either the extravagant sumptuousness of over-dressed women, or the stagey bedizenment of stage-queens."Sarah never knew when to stop after she was launched on her eager dissertations. She delivered so many of them in the privacy of her room to Charlotte Kirby that had not Charlotte been more patient and indulgent than she was formerly, she would not have stood the infliction.As it was, Charlotte only said to herself, "It is only dear old Sal, and why should she not be permitted to have her fling once in a while? She is so good and reasonable, usually, that she would be too perfect for anything if she did not have a fad or two, and run mad upon them occasionally. It is well for her that she has a fad, and worse luck for me that I have none. There are my flowers, to be sure, but they don't inspire me as gowns and hats inspire Sarah. It must be my fault, it cannot be my lovely sweet flowers which are to blame. It is because I have not the heart and soul of Sarah and Delia Wentworth that I cannot be enthusiastic, and only sneer at enthusiasm as 'gush' and 'intensity.'"It was well for Charlotte to own as much with a sigh. If she had been quite the old Charlotte, if she had not taken a step in advance of her former self, she would have been clamouring to Miss Barret for a separate room, and with it a deliverance from her too earnest and eloquent companion.Sarah, if not Delia, was in danger of assuming to the rest of the students who were only learning purely decorative arts, or such branches of usefulness as straw-plaiting and lace-weaving, or as butter and cheese-making, which had but a partial and not a universal application, the attitude of the chimney sweep and his apprentice to the tailor and his apprentice."I don't wish to undervalue any honest calling," the attitude implied, "and I don't know what I may come to, if I am not found worthy of a high enterprise, but I do presume to think that while you others—you, my dear girl, and so many more here who are being trained to give pleasure and entertainment—excellent things in their way—to a portion of your fellow-creatures, for Delia and me, within our poor human limits, we address ourselves to benefiting the whole human race.""Oh! I say," protested an incredulous rebel."If we could only aid in the reform of food and clothing," Sarah continued to soar, "how much we should do directly for men and women's suffering bodies, and indirectly for their burdened energies, oppressed consciences, and, to descend lower, their collapsing purses.""Keep your hair on, Sarah," urged one of the party, in pretended anxiety."To know how to cook and to use properly cooked food, and how to choose and to wear proper clothes would be an immense saving all round. There would be little need for medical men and their drugs, to give you one example, when we were, in the main, judiciously fed and clad.""I am convinced," Delia actually chimed in, "there could be no greater benefactors to mankind, unless, indeed, the teachers of spiritual things. But how few sermons, even when they are listened to, are acted upon! What a slight and fleeting impression even the finest of them make on their hearers! I think it is not profanity to recall that the Lord did not disdain to minister to the body, and through it to the soul."Miss Barret watched the movement in which the two girls were prominent with a shrewdly kind eye. "Delia and Sarah have a good deal of right on their side—there is no denying it—but excellent cooking and rational dressmaking will not recall the garden of Eden,"the looker on said to herself.The students were allowed to receive visitors—kindred and friends—within certain bounds—bounds which naturally had least expansiveness and most rigidity where brothers and brothers' chums and male cousins were in question.But Miss Barret had great faith in Sarah Lyster. She was gratified by the single-heartedness with which she had accepted the line selected for her, and by the eager zeal with which she had ultimately thrown herself into it.Miss Barret held that such admirable qualities not only did honour to the Institute, they reflected credit on those naval antecedents with their hereditary discipline and staunchness which Sarah had in common with Miss Barret herself.The lady superintendent of the Institute contrived to effect a diversion in her young friend's favour. It was when Dick Lyster and his fellow artist Val Cheyne, in their search for artistic subjects, drifted down to the neighbourhood of Chesnut Green. The lads proposed, with the Bohemianism of light-hearted youth, regardless of obligations and consequent restrictions, to quarter themselves in the village of Chesnut Green for ten days.The openly-avowed objects of the pair were to "do" the bits of scenery the budding artists had selected for pencil and brush, and to be near Sarah, the sister of the one and the familiar friend of the other. Doubtless, in their free calculation, they also reckoned that it would be jolly to make the acquaintance of any number of Sarah's companions, and to use the capabilities and peculiarities of the Institute and Emporium for the young fellows' benefit during their stay in the vicinity.Now this is a free country, and not all the King's horses, all the King's men, not Mr Sam Ferrie and his whole Council behind him, could prevent Dick Lyster and Val Cheyne from engaging apartments in the village—though the authorities could, and probably would, bear a grudge against the unoffending Sarah if evil came of the action.For there have been such things as audacious larks in connection with ladies' schools, and juvenile escapades under the very nose of the most starched of guardians, with an additional flavour lent to the forbidden fruit in the eyes of the mischievous perpetrators, which only the merry hearts and scatterbrains of early manhood, that has not yet lost its boyishness, can excuse.Girls are older for their years than lads, and poor Sarah, who knew something of lads and their thoughtless, wilful ways, was torn in two directions, and filled with fear and trembling. She would so much like to have a little time with Dick and Val, from whom she had been largely separated for over two years.On the other hand, she felt as if she would be responsible if any foolish liberty were taken, any boy or girl lost his or her head, if work were neglected, if Mr Sam Ferrie should be enraged and Miss Barret scandalised, then Sarah would never forgive herself.Upon the whole, though it was hard to deny one's self a boon and to disappoint one's relations and friends, Sarah felt it might be her duty to warn Miss Barret of the proposed invasion, and to ask her to interpose and take steps to prevent it.Miss Barret was equal to the occasion, while she was still her sympathetic, considerate self. She did not drop hints, which would have been effectual, of her objections to the cottagers who let rooms in the village of Chesnut Green. These small householders depended almost entirely on the patronage of the Institute. They were really so many dependents on the will and pleasure of its authorities, and would on no account thwart their chief patron and his subordinates.But Miss Barret did a great deal better than that; she executed quite a masterly stroke of policy. She called to mind that, among the different teachers of drawing and painting in the Institute, there was none whose supreme forte was sketching, and that even half a dozen lessons in this branch from fresh sources might be an advantage to the students.With Mr Ferrie's consent, she hailed the surprised young men when they reported themselves at St Catherine's, and presented a request from the president for such services as would not interfere with the artists' main object in visiting Chesnut Green. A short interview with Mr Sam Ferrie found them enrolled, for the brief time they were to tarry in the village, on the staff of Institute teachers.When Miss Barret saw this end achieved, she knew that her purpose was accomplished; for Dick Lyster and Val Cheyne were gentlemen, and were on their honour from that moment not to infringe a single rule or to interfere with so much as a tradition of the establishment.Nay, when Mr Sam Ferrie, who had been a lover and patron of art in his day, before he found other uses for his time and money, took the lads up, had them to dine with him and to have sundry "pipes" with him, Dick and Val were almost as grateful and impressed by the honour as Sarah was on their account. Sarah was enabled to enjoy seeing Dick and his crony pretty often without a single arrière pensée.However, Dick was not a convert to her opinions, though she aired them pretty freely for his benefit. He had never been altogether reconciled to Sarah's dropping art and sinking into trade.Dick's proclivities were all for professions, and he liked to say that none of the Lysters—though they had generally been as poor as church mice, and one of them had entered the merchant service, which, after all, was a manly resource—had ever descended into being hucksters and traffickers.Now here was Sarah, his only sister, of whom he was fond and proud after his fashion, the first to take the compromising step—more compromising for a woman than for a man, in spite of the aristocratic whim which has of late years lent a certain éclat to millinery and dressmaking as an amusement and a resource for idle, impecunious ladies. But a woman could never hope to make such a fortune as many a man made in trade and thus managed to wipe out the reproach.As for poor, dear Sarah's rabid talk about benefiting the world at large, of course that was all high-faluting and feminine extravagance. He had to confess that Sarah would never have made a great painter—not a Rosa Bonheur nor an Elizasbeth Thompson—but she might have pottered away happily enough at her "interiors" and fruit and flower pieces, and earned a little money to add to their mother's pension.When that failed—Dick trusted it would not be for many a day—why, then he would surely be of sufficient repute, and be earning enough to afford old Sally a slice of his income. She need not have gone out of her rank and lost caste by turning dressmaker!Ferrie was a regular brick, and Miss Barret was a thorough gentlewoman—you had not to look twice at her to tell that—but they had a crank about this scheme of theirs, this Institute business, which was to regenerate the world of women by equipping them with trade tools, while Sarah was the craziest of their converts.Val Cheyne was the more amenable of the two lads to Sarah's new vision of a calling. At the same time, he was the better painter of the pair, with an irresistible inclination to high art in scriptural and historic subjects, in tragedies rather than comedies, in landscapes so homely, or savage, or sad, as to repel the mere seeker after pleasant things—skin-deep beauty and gardens of roses.Yet it was Val who listened with respectful conviction to Sarah's rhapsodies; and when he and Dick were suffered, out of working hours, to walk through the empty showrooms and workrooms, where Sarah spent much of her life, he, Val, did not decline to handle and approve of the rich and dainty stuffs, and the wealth of hues of every shade, which offered themselves for his inspection."I believe I ought to have been a dyer, like Tintoret's father," he declared gaily, "for I feel I am getting colour-drunk. Oh, I say, Sarah—Miss Lyster—there is something wrong with that blue; don't have anything to do with it. Though the material falls into folds and takes lines which would be grand to paint, there is a strain amiss in the colour which would set your teeth on edge without your knowing what ailed you. Now that cardinal-red is perfect, but the pattern is wrong and is out of drawing. Besides, the peddling design does not harmonise with the grand colour.""Shut up, Val," cried Dick, indignantly. "Don't you go in for man-millinery. Don't degrade art, you who aspire to high art, by applying its laws to haberdashery.""I don't see the degradation," protested Val, pulling his dark moustache. He was a spare, brown fellow, with an honest, unassuming face—so unassuming that, had it not been for the forehead, a spectator might have missed the intellect in it. "I think art is like religion; it isn't good for much if it cannot enter into the whole creation, and deal with every detail, great and small.""You are a duffer to take up that line," complained the aggrieved Dick, "you who must paint Job and Jeremiah, Greek warriors and Harold—not him who was dauntless, but the other beggar who fell at Hastings—serve him right if he was as wooden in nature as he generally is in art! You who love seashores and barren marshes instead of the Thames at Henley, or a lordly park with a meet of the hounds in front of the hall door. Val, you're a humbug; I'm ashamed of you.""No, I'm not,"said Val, stoutly. "I'm small if you like, with a narrow horizon. I ought to be able to take in a stockbroker on 'Change, a rich man eating his dinner, a barge crowned with ladies, an M. F. H. surrounded by his dogs, and see all the throbbing life—tragic and comic—that lies in them beneath the surface, instead of seeking it in more obvious—in what you may think stagey regions.""You ought, if you thought of the main chance," said Dick, coolly."But if I can't, I can't; only that does not hinder the fact that art, like religion, is everywhere, or it is nowhere. Your sister is right when she prefers the greater good, which, I take it, is a high truth in itself. It may not be given to her, as it is not given to many of us, to create beauty in any other fashion.""Oh! thank you, Mr Val," cried Sarah, looking radiant, "and don't think I'm a fool. I know now I never could have painted in the real sense of the term. As for you, who have it in you to paint, I don't wonder, I do nothing save admire and reverence men when they prefer to be poor, or even to run the risk of starving, rather than not exercise the God-given faculty they possess.""No, no," protested Val. "You give us too much credit. It is only that we cannot keep ourselves from going on.""Art has been entrusted to your keeping," maintained Sarah, "and I understand you must use it in the precise manner in which you feel you can best discharge your task and deliver your message. I am so much obliged to you for the hints about the error in the tint of the blue velvet and the pattern of the cardinal red brocade. I had a feeling they failed in some respects, but I could not have put my finger on the errors till you pointed them out to me."CHAPTER XIN THE THICK OF THE FIGHTIT was the established custom at the Institute for the students to supply, at regular intervals, samples of their work, by which their teachers and the heads of the Institute could judge of their progress.Delia and Sarah had hitherto come triumphantly through this test. On the last occasion of the kind, Delia had sent in a soup and a mayonnaise which were chefs-d' œuvre at a dinner of the members of the Council, held in Mr Sam Ferrie's dining-room. Sarah had produced for the inspecítion of a qualified judge a transcendently embroidered opera cloak, and a cunningly quilted dressing-gown.But these evidences of skill were a slight instalment of the performances which were required from the young women at the end of their three years' apprenticeship, in order to win for them the distinction of having attained to first or second classes in their respective callings, or at least of having obtained honourable mention and testiímonials, which were equivalent to certificates of merit, calculated to secure for the possessors remunerative appointments and engagements.For this fit conclusion of the course an elaborate and searching examination was ordained. Accredited experts in the different departments were summoned from London and elsewhere. These sat in solemn conclave, and day after day the fine fruits of the Institute's doings, and the stores of the Emporium, were laid before the judges.Delia was called on to furnish, not one or two select dishes, but whole meals—breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, and suppers—for every sort and condition of guest.She did it for the working men and women, who were her pet clients, whose butter and dripping were scanty, whose eggs were few, whose cream—like their wines—was non-existent. At these banquets savoury broth and tasty stews, in which potatoes, lentils, and onions played as prominent a part as beef or mutton, prevailed largely.She did it also for the partakers of Lord Mayors' feasts—to whom real turtle and soufflés of exquisite composition were as common as bread and cheese.Sarah had to send in, not one garment, but entire suits of clothing fitted for all ranks. Her last exploit lay in the direcítion of bonnets and caps for old ladies."Wouldn't it be more paying and satisífactory to work for young ladies?" some mercenary soul suggested."Pooh!" retorted Sarah, "they can look after themselves. They can or they ought to look charming in sackcloth and ashes—we can do little to paint the lily or perfume the rose, but we ought to be able to make bonnets and caps which are at once decorous and comfortable, and neither dowdy nor unbecoming, for old ladies.""Is the game worth the candle?" asked Ella Mainwaring."Yes, a hundred times yes," insisted Sarah. "When I speak of hiding the ravages of time, I don't mean by pretending they are not there, or by masking them with hair dyes and paint and powder. I mean to acknowledge them and work for them till what people please to call 'ravages' are touched with the honour and dignity which ought to be their due.""Are you going to work miracles?" inquired Charlotte Kirby. "Even you can't do that, Sal.""You will see," Sarah nodded cheerfully. "When I am a full-fledged milliner my old ladies will not be ghastly harridans, or made-up effigies with their poor thin or flabby cheeks bare, and a tuft of feathers or a knot of riband on the top of their wigs or their moulted heads—sometimes the victims have not even that.""Why are the silly old things such fools?" demanded an irreverent youngster who would be old herself some day. Sarah did not hear her; she was starting off on a new grievance."When old women are so fortunate as to have glorious hoary heads—which a mob cap or a little lace would shade in the most becoming manner—the owners of the heads sin against them almost as cruelly as if the snowy hair were soiled and dulled by filthy dyes. These old women are so ill advised as to plait, coil and curl and 'fluff' their own silver hair as if it were their daughter's golden crown, forgetting that there is a great difference between silver and golden hair.""What would you have them do?" urged a bewildered listener, in good faith."Do what my old women will do, and yet not be frumps with structures like battered coal-scuttles, or the poke bonnets of the Salvation Army lasses, on their disfigured heads.""But you have not told us what your old women are to do?" pressed an interested girl."Ah! that is my secret," declared Sarah, gaily, "but you may depend upon this. These heads will no longer be left to the tender mercies of the careless, scornful milliner of the past, who reserves all her strength for the young and blooming. She takes her pride in the decoration of those who need little adornment, and, if they are wise, will not seek it, for it will only obscure their natural charms.""Don't they need it?" put in a dry, dissentient voice.Sarah was too far gone to answer. She was waxing pathetic. Presently she recovered her speech."My old ladies will be the prettiest possible old ladies. They will have becoming shelter for scraggy necks and tidy strings tied under double chins. There will be a frank and yet a delicate confession of advancing years. You have no idea how sweet and venerable my old ladies will look. I expect their grand-daughters will envy them."There was great bustle and excitement throughout the Institute. Not only did specialists come down to Chesnut Green, to pronounce on the skill and prowess of advanced sections of the students, but many ladies and gentlemen, connected with the Council or unofficially friendly to the enterprise, appeared on the scene to be entertained by Mr Sam Ferrie, Miss Barret and the other heads of the boarding-houses.All day long examinations in proficiency in various crafts went on, and every spare moment was seized by the candidates for fresh preparation and fresh practice which might conduce to a successful issue.The strain was great, though the President had striven hard to prevent it. Human nature—above all feminine human nature—was too much for him. The young women who were to be examined worked themselves up for the most part into a fever of nervous anxiety and distress.Hardly anybody would take things calmly. The debutantes, if one may call them so, acted as if the fate of the world depended on the proofs of the girls' attainments in bread and butter-making, fine dressing of linen and lace, etc., etc.Miss Barret had to go through all the rooms in St Catherine's at cock-crow in order to detect the delinquents who were breaking the rules of the house, and sitting up, growing always more feverish and distrait as they conned their manuals, or went over and over again artful devices in wood and cloth, or "fetching" examples of drug dispensing or hair-dressing.One desperate young woman (not Delia Wentworth) smuggled a whole array of pots and pans into her room and woke the night with appetising odours in a wild attempt at acquiring, at the eleventh hour, knowledge which she had failed to make her own in the working day.The whole talk was of examinations; the very air was full of them. The play-fields and play-hours were mere excuses for the young women entering into breathless confabulations—in the course of which the eager talkers cross-questioned each other on the examiners, their merits and demerits, and each sufferer asked the other how she had survived the dreaded ordeal."My dears," cried a pupil of Ella Main-waring's, "that man from the Academy of Music was a monster, simply a monster. He laughed when I took a wrong F sharp, and he asked if my sight was defective because I did not read off the music at a glance like a common fiddler.""He could not have been worse than the accountant man who hinted that my views of the multiplication table must be peculiar—to say the least," another girl bemoaned herself for the insult."Oh! but did you hear about the Dutch cheeseman whom Mr Ferrie had brought over from Holland to test the cheese. He did not understand what Miss Melcombe was saying about the curd. He fancied she was contradicting him. He got into a rage, snatched up a handful of the curd parings and threw them at her. He has been asked to go back to Holland, and his name has been taken off the list of examiners. The affair is to be hushed up."Of course the story of the Dutch cheese-man was a myth—one of a crust of legends and superstitions which, in spite of the comparative modernness of the Institute, was rapidly gathering round the great examination week."If you walk backwards the whole length of the Steignton play-field and repeat tables of weights and measures all the time, they say you cannot fail to pass," mentioned a credulous neophyte."No, no, there is nothing in that," contradicted another. "I'll tell you what you must do. You must avoid the Hornbeam Lane to the village. You must not have put your foot in it for the whole of the last term if you wish to have luck.""I should prefer the morning service at the church since it is Lent," another improved upon the proposal. "You know we are allowed—those of us who are High Church—to be a little late at the workshops in Lent. We could say an additional prayer that we might be helped to pass.""Do you think your passing or not passing a thing to pray for, or against?" ob-jected a sceptical caviller. "Is it a matter of such vast importance that you can ask the God of the universe to interfere on your behalf?""Well," maintained the advocate of prayer, "if He would interpose to save my life were it in danger—and I suppose nobody would blame me for crying to Him for help in that case—and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His knowledge, and the very hairs of our head are numbered, is it not possible that He will deign to hear my petition, and answer it, when I implore Him, if it is for my good, to grant what I seek?""But it is sheerly temporal, and we are not warranted in expecting God to answer such petitions," objected a girl."Well, this passing and getting an honourable certificate in tapestry weaving is a matter well-nigh of life and death to me," explained the girl speaker. "There are five girls of us, and father is an invalid, and if I don't get a good certificate there is not much chance of my securing a place in the manufactory of the tapestry weaver whose wife has paid my expenses here."If poverty brings the impecunious man or woman into strange company, anxiety drives him or her into piteous confidences.It was the second week in Lent, in anticipation of a late Easter, since the examinations occurred towards the close of the spring term in the Institute. The work of the place was to go on for some time after the crucial week, to give the examiners—busy men and women all of them—time to draw up their reports and make their awards before the Easter holidays, after which those students who had completed their third year would not return to Chesnut Green.The tension of the last effort, together with the strain of the suspense which endured for a season, was great, and told even on the bodily health of the aspirants. The result, though different in cause, was not unlike that produced on "pretty Miss Millar" in the days of her love-sickness. Outbreaks of tumultuous emotion had to be promptly subdued in more than one of the boarding-houses.The doctor's hands were full, and he began to look grim and stern, like a man nerving himself to do his duty by turning on the authorities (more particularly on the autocrat, Mr Sam Ferrie) and commanding them to stop, at their peril, their injudicious stimulating of women's excitable brains and nerves, with the consequent wear and tear of their weaker physical frames.Two girls had ignominiously broken down into mere wrecks, and retired defeated from the ranks before the battle was well begun.Another girl had been goaded into standing at bay, stonily declining to answer the questions or to do the work required from her, turning on her heel and marching out of her special workshop before the eyes of the amazed examiners. This was affording a glaring instance of "scratching" on the part of a competitor in the innocent and beneficent enterprise, "The Institute and Emporium of Technical Knowledge and its Products for the Benefit of Women."Mr Sam Ferrie said the contest was all a matter of use and wont, and that what the girls needed was a hardening process. They gave way in the same manner at the close of a university curriculum. For that matter, so did many a young man who had not been as a boy to a public school, who was thin-skinned and sensitive, and had not had such nonsense knocked out of him.In reality, Mr Sam was in despair. If there was an accusation which pained and exasperated him beyond measure, it was that the training of the Institute was injurious to the health of the young women subjected to it. He had taken every precaution against so fatal a flaw in the institution, and as a rule no healthier women and girls could be found in England than those assembled at Chesnut Green. It was only in connection with the examination week that they thought fit to droop and fade.He besought Miss Barrett to co-operate with him to divert the current. He gave her carte blanche to issue invitations for a series of evening parties on the plea of entertaining the examiners. He would even have opened the jealously-closed gates to all the brothers and male cousins of the pupils if that would have turned them from the maddening concentration of interest which was proving too much for them.Miss Barrett laughed a little at him, and assured him the turmoil would die a natural death, as it had always done before, when the compelling motive ceased to exist. "My dear sir, you know the old saying, 'Train up a child in the way he should go,' and so on. We women have not been trained practically for any service in the world which is not purely domestic.""And isn't that your primary service?""Certainly, but in this nineteenth century we are called upon to vindicate our right to live and move and have our being, by coming out of our old groove and doing all the work we can properly accomplish. You must put up for a time with the lack of training to reasonable independence which is as much the fault of you men as of us women.""And aren't we bearing our punishment?" he reminded her grimly."You deserve it. You must aid in redressing the wrong which you have helped to inflict in keeping us entirely men's women, destitute of all save home discipline, and we have not always had that to fall back upon. Even doctors—our good friend here at the Institute among them—do not take the absence of training into account when they rail at the absurdity of expecting a sound mind and solid work from creatures with so inferior a physique.""You ought to prove him wrong.""So we shall in time. In the meaníwhile you expect too much from us. Yet if we are found incapable of providing for our wants nowadays, will these conservative doctors and other men come forward in a body to fill the starving mouths and clothe the shivering backs of women in no way belonging to them? Time will do wonders in bracing us, and only time can show how we will shake down in our new careers.""I have my doubts.""Don't doubt. All the white heat and effervescence you deplore will pass away. Examination weeks will become matters of course to us, as they are to healthy-minded men.""More so, let us hope," he interjected.She pursued the even tenor of her argument. "For even to them, if I have not been misinformed, examinations, 'Responsions,' 'Mods,' 'Greats,' or competitive tests of any kind are sometimes a trial and temptation at one of the starting points in their lives. There are stories—you will be able to tell me whether they are true or not—of men who have hung fire, tortured themselves into brain fevers, shot themselves, nay, run away under the exigencies of the situation.""Yes, yes, there are plenty of cowards and blue funks at such times," he growled absently. He said nothing for a moment, then he burst out again petulantly, "I could feel inclined to chuck up the whole scheme, though my father's heart was in it, and you and I, Miss Barret, have given it a good deal of time and thought.""And a large slice of your forítune," muttered the lady, half under her breath."Were it not," he went on without heeding her, "for such young women as Miss Wentworth and Miss Lyster.""As they are women and not men, I would not be too sure even of Miss Wentworth and Miss Lyster," cried Miss Barret, with a would-be tragic shake of her spirited old head. Then she took pity upon him. "You may depend upon Delia Wentworth and Sarah Lyster," Miss Barret said emphatically. "They will assuredly do credit to St Catherine's and the Chesnut Green Institute."An awful shock from the world without, while the disaster was yet intimately mixed up with the Institute and St Catherine's, was destined to fall like a bolt from the blue on the engrossed little settleíment.And what were examinations, classes, certificates, save trifles light as air, which shrank and shrivelled into nothingness in the face of the dread realities of life and death?A piece of news broke on the preoccupied strugglers in the lists and on the keenly-interested lookers-on, which laid chill, arresting fingers on each bounding pulse and froze the listeners with horror.An accident had happened to a boat in common use as a ferry-boat to take passengers across the river Rush, a mile and a half from Chesnut Green. A local fair had caused an overcrowding of the boat by passengers who were not in a condition to preserve its balance. The boat was upset, and three people—a man and two women—were drowned. The man was not one of the fair-goers, and he was as sober as he always was.Poor Colin Rae, in his dogged Scotch industry and prudent foresight, had been straining every nerve and taking advantage of every opening to increase his small income and render it more secure. He had taught early and late, taking outlying classes and night classes in various centres around. In going to one of these classes the accident had occurred.The hapless young wife was a widow, without any save the most slender sum in hand for her own maintenance and that of her baby, still unborn. It was that most untimely of all deaths in human estimation, of which the record remains in the unsurpassable pathos of a verse from a ballad of the dead man's country:— "His hay is to cut,His corn's unshorn,His barn's to big,**BuildAnd his baby's unborn."A hush of consternation and intense pity fell on the swarm of workers in the Institute. Like the finger of death which had touched poor Rae and sent him after a few desperate and fruitless struggles to the peace of his long, last sleep, the solemn event quieted the feverish combatants.It could hardly be believed that one of the great tragedies of life, for which there is no remedy, had happened in a moment almost in the midst of them, to one with whom they were familiar, and to another who, but a day or two ago, as it seemed, had been one of themselves.Oh, poor, hard-working, conscientious Mr Rae! and poor, poor, "pretty Miss Millar!" (Minnie was "pretty Miss Millar" again in the mind's eye of her companions.)"What will become of her?" cried one and all. "They were so happy together; he was so fond of her and careful of her. She was so proud of her husband, so pleased to be his wife and a married woman. Only last week she was wondering how we could make so great a fuss about trifles like our examinations.""She was nearly provoking us," added others "(dear, dear! and how little we guessed what was going to be!) by implyíing that we were a little silly and childish, troubling ourselves with standards and rules and difficulties of our own creating. She was past all that. She had gone a step beyond us, and was engaged in the real business of life.""How pretty she looked as she pretended to laugh at us," a keen observer recalled for the benefit of her companions; and Mr Rae called her back and said,—"'Come, come, Minnie, you know examinations are serious affairs to me.' And she answered,—"'Yes, Colin, dear, because our bread and butter depend upon them, so that it is lucky that you always come triumphantly out of them. But otherwise I am sure we don't mind. I know, and many far better judges than I, fortunately, are of the same opinion, that you are the best drawing-master going. Why, you have been asked to take a class as far off as Kenley?'""And it was when he was going to that very class, if you will believe me," a horrified listener recalled the circumstance, "that the accident at the ferry took place and he perished." The speaker ended as if Fate had been guilty of a special irony in the coincidence.CHAPTER XI"WE MUST RISK IT, SARAH"EVERYTHING the truest kindness and consideration could think of to alleviate Minnie Rae's misfortune, which was in itself beyond remedy, was put at her service by Sam Ferrie and Miss Barret.Miss Barret broke to the poor young widow the stunning news of the terrible loss which would alter her whole life, staying with her during every spare moment the elder woman could command.Mr Sam Ferrie took upon himself all the melancholy duties which devolve upon friends and relatives when the head of a house is removed from his place.Minnie had very few relations beyond her uncles and her young brothers. One of the brothers, a naval cadet, whose ship chanced to be in port, hurried with the utmost goodwill to the scene. But he was in the way in the small, overwhelmed house-hold. His inexperience, distress and alarm prevented him from being a stay.One of Minnie's uncles, the bachelor uncle, contented himself with sending a cheque, while he excused himself from being present at the funeral.The wife of the other uncle was the sole available female relative on whom Minnie might have counted. She had spent her holidays with this aunt-by-marriage when Minnie was a little girl being educated at one of the semi-charitable schools for the orphan daughters of professional men. The Raes had been married—so short a time ago as it seemed—from this aunt and uncle's house.But the couple were already abroad for Easter. They were making the round of the German watering-places for a slight disorder in the gentleman's health, which they thought of far more importance than poor young Colin Rae's death and his widow's consequent desolation. As the pair's own affairs were necessarily of paramount moment, not even a cheque was needed as an apology for their failing to grace Rae's funeral with their presence.The disaster appeared—as disasters so often appear—to have come to pass at a peculiarly unpropitious time. The welfare of the students at St Catherine's, and indeed of the students at the Institute who had a personal interest in the triennial crisis, depended largely on the presence and unslumbering oversight of Mr Ferric and Miss Barret. It was their part to marshal and control the whole, or, in Miss Barret's case, an important section of the students. It was their duty also to entertain and interest the examiners and the company at present flocking to the Institute.If either man or woman failed in his or her task, whatever the excuse, the mass of the students, whose fortunes might hang in the balance, would suffer; so would the Council, the members of which had appointed Mr Sam Ferrie their grand vizier, while he had delegated to Miss Barret as much responsibility as she could carry.No private consideration could interfere with a public duty. No poor little forlorn widow in the first dark days of her widowhood, in the anticipation of another trial in which she had hoped to be sustained by the strength, courage and devotion of her husband, but which she had to face alone, could, however kind hearts might bleed for her, be suffered to interfere with the main claims of St Catherine's and the Institute.Miss Barret had summoned a qualified nurse to be in attendance at the small house in the village.The first spruceness of the simple little nest had already begun to be on the wane, because of the original cheapness of the furniture, partly also because of poor Minnie's consequential but halting housekeeping. Nobody thought of that now, however, or remarked how the curtains and carpets had been allowed to fade, and the chairs were getting rickety in the dismal change which had come over the place.The window blinds had never been rightly drawn up since Colin Rae was drowned. Minnie's face was no longer visible behind the panes.The little front gate was unopened save by the hands of the doctor, the clergyman, or a compassionate visitor.The flower border, in which the master of the house had exhibited his gardening skill and his national predilections by the introduction of "Garden Heather" and hepaticas, which flourish best in "the north countrie," crimson "Spinks" and "Dusty Millers," which Minnie knew as polyanthuses and auricula, was left uncared for and drooping, as if it missed and mourned for its patron.Mr Ferrie had charged the doctor to apply to him for funds, and had taken measures so that the little storeroom and larder were brimming over with household provisions. The boy brother, nervous and apprehensive under the burden of the charge which had suddenly devolved upon him, had it strongly impressed upon him to be company to his poor sister, to keep up her spirits and take care of her till more competent people were set at liberty and could come to her aid.It was the evening before the last and the chief day of the examinations, when, in accordance with a favourite theory of Mr Sam Ferrie's, the principal students were to give an example of their processes of work in the presence of distinguished experts, the acting examiners, and a privileged company.In anticipation of this fit conclusion to the prolonged ordeal, a kind of comprehensive reception and banquet, which included among its guests, not merely the visitors and the officials, but all the elder students, was given in the largest hall of the Institute.Sarah Lyster was just finishing a careful toilet for the occasion. She was telling herself that it was a professional duty as a milliner and dressmaker, not less than a young woman's pleasant rôle, to be well dressed. It afforded a convincing testimony to her qualifications for her calling that she should act as a walking advertisement.Accordingly Sarah was well dressed in the finished style which recognises every obligation of times and seasons, means and materials. Her symmetrically - moulded figure and intelligent, rather piquant, face had never appeared to greater advantage than in the simple but exquisitely cut, draped and fitted nasturtium-coloured nun's veiling, with the wing-like sleeves, and the delicate embroidery lending distinction to the corsage.Even Charlotte Kirby could find no fault to pick out and expatiate upon in Sarah's turn out, while it was only with difficulty that Charlotte herself could be induced to embellish an old mauve dinner dress with a cluster of her flowers."Why don't you make the best of yourself, Char?" said Sarah, near to being vexed."Because I am not worth it, my dear," replied Charlotte, carelessly, but with a shade of less bitter unbelief and hopelessness in her voice than used to be in it. Regular work, in which she was born to excel, which she therefore loved—though she might hide the love from herself and fight against it with human perversity—had done something for her."Then you owe it to St Catherine's and the Institute, to Miss Barret and Mr Ferrie,"asserted Sarah with determination."I have been so often told of my debt to them that I am afraid the statement has lost effect," declared Charlotte, with her chin high in the air, an attitude which some people regarded as attractive, but which Sarah particularly disliked.To do Charlotte justice the action was involuntary and mechanical, the lingering remnant of a bad trick—probably hereditary—which had lost much of its offensive meaning."And to think of your not wishing to have a flower about your dress!" protested Sarah, disconsolately, "and having a mind not to betray the trace of a bouquet! You, who live among lovely flowers, and are never done with arranging bouquets!""The very reason why I should decline one in my own person. Don't you see it would be sporting 'shop?' and I object to turning my flowers into 'shop' when I can help it."Sarah pricked her ears. It was not at the sentiment which she did not endorse, it was at the tone in which Charlotte said "my flowers.""What have they done?" continued the speaker, unconscious of the impression she was creating, "poor single-hearted innocents that blossom just because they must, to be made to serve as an advertisement of my work and of the Institute.""Well, an advertisement may be overdone, but it is not necessarily a bad thing"—Sarah defended herself—"and 'shop' is not bad either, not at all bad, considering that we are a nation of shopkeepers. 'Shop' is, or ought to be, the breath of our nostrils at the Institute."It was at this point that there was a tap at the door, and Delia Wentworth came in, looking as white as the white dress she wore."What is it, Delia?" cried Sarah, in alarm, the moment she beheld her."It is bad news of Minnie Rae. Her brother Toby has run over from the village with it. Fortunately he had the sense to ask for me when he heard Miss Barret was engaged, and could not get away to-night. She has not been well herself, and it will only upset her further, and distress her beyond measure, to tell her she is urgently wanted where she cannot possibly go.""Oh, dear, how unfortunate!" exclaimed Sarah."The nurse she summoned for poor Minnie has been called away to a more critical case. The woman was under the impression that Minnie would not want her till she was free again. The society to which she belongs has sent a substitute in the meantime, but she is young and inexperienced. Even Toby, who is young himself, sees that, and he says she has shown she is frightened, which proves, I am afraid, that she is also a fool.""Oh, dear!" cried Sarah again, and Charlotte gave the same helpless cry"Wait till you hear the rest," said Delia, grimly, to hide other feelings. "Dr Webb got up this morning with a touch of lumbago, which has developed to such an extent in the course of the day that he cannot stir hand or foot. He has telegraphed to town for a temporary assistant, but many doctors are leaving for their Easter holidays.""Oh! what do people want with such silly things as holidays," protested Sarah, "when there are such sorrow and suffering about?" Charlotte for once followed suit."And have you heard," continued Delia, with a kind of desperate calmness, "that the nurses in the Nurses' Home here are having their Easter holidays in advance of other people? I suppose Mr Ferrie thought it was a good time when the examinations were all but over, and so many of us would be away. Anyhow, there is nobody left but Nurse Brown, and she is only fit to teach dispensary work.""It is grievous," sighed Sarah."You may say so. Not a doctor to be had at an hour's notice, not a nurse worth her salt on the spot. And did not somebody carry the disconcerting report to Minnie this morning, just when she had come across a cabinet photograph, as like as life, of poor Mr Rae.""Why did they not keep it out of her sight?" demanded Charlotte, with a stamp of her foot."It had been sent home after his death, and the parcel had not been opened till now. As might have been expected, Minnie has broken down entirely. She has been crying and sobbing all the afternoon. They have not been able to quiet her. Now, Toby believes she is going off her head, so he has run over at his wits' end to ask what is to be done.""What is to be done?" Sarah and Charlotte repeated the question, looking blankly in each other's startled faces.Then Sarah wasted her breath in be-moaning the inopportune holidays of the training school for nurses, and was reminded that it was only a training school for ordinary nurses. The principals themselves had not the special professional knowledge which was called for in this instance, though even Nurse Brown might be somebody to fall back upon if Nurse Marion lost all the small stock of wits with which she had started."I can only say what is not to be done," Delia proceeded to announce with decision. "Poor Minnie is not to be left, in her strait. at the mercy of an idiot of a nurse, and of that distracted boy Toby.""By-the-bye, his real name cannot be Tobias," said Sarah, with that abrupt deviation into trivialities in which we are apt to indulge at the most serious moments of our lives. "' Toby' must be a familiar nickname, as 'Marion,' I have no doubt, is a sentimental adaptation. In all probability, for ' Nurse Marion,' read ' Nurse Mary Anne.'""What are you saying? I am not sure that Minnie's life is not in danger, and if not her life, her reason," Delia protested. "Sarah, we must risk it.""I will risk anything for poor dear Minnie—anything to save her life or her reason," said Sarah, with a choke in her voice, "if you will tell me how we can be of use to her.""Don't ask how we can be of use," commanded Delia, imperiously. "We are women grown; we are bound to be of use. We have some common sense and self-control, I hope; we are better than a weak goose of an incapable nurse and a benighted boy, or than the best of the village old women, who might be of more value if they were not full of ignorant fancies and violent prejudices.""What is the good of our youth, strength, and education, if they are not to make us helpful—when help is needed?" asked Sarah."Besides, Minnie will be pleased to have her friends with her, instead of being left to a stranger. She has few older or nearer friends, and I think I may be able to soothe her; she always listened to me, even when I scolded her. I used to get her calmed down, when she was in a nervous state, before her marriage; and now, to think it is all over—her lover and husband in his grave, and Minnie a widow!"Don't speak of it," besought Sarah, hiding her face."We must risk it," insisted Delia."I will, I will," assented Sarah, with all her heart."But you cannot go in these dresses," objected Charlotte, incredulously."Of course not," agreed Delia, emphatically, and with disdain at the notion."And you will be missed and inquired after if you are not at the table," continued Char."We shall be at the table; we'll just take our places with the others, and then, by the time coffee comes in, we'll steal out," suggested Delia."Nobody will notice then,"agreed Sarah," or if they do, they will simply think we are tired—that we have had enough of the party, the good dishes, and the speeches, and have gone early to prepare for tomorrow. We'll change these stupid things in a moment, and run over to the village and do what we can. If we are not wanted we will be back the sooner.""But, Sarah," remonstrated Charlotte, "you will wear yourself out, you have worked so hard already; and if you should fail at the last, there would not only be the mortification, there would be the positive loss.""That is true," admitted Sarah."Passing well may not matter to Miss Wentworth," went on Charlotte rather icily (for there had been no great love lost between Delia and Charlotte, who had secretly resented Delia's cool appropriation of her#x2014;Charlotte's friend. Sarah's value, the instant Charlotte was threatened with her loss, had risen approximately in the scale), "but I know it matters a great deal to you, and your mother and brother."Charlotte had been told that Dick had not sold a picture lately, and was in decidedly low water. It was in Sarah's own interest that Charlotte thus advanced her claims, and those of Mrs Lyster and Dick, with sincere urgency. "After doing so much all these years, Sarah, and tomorrow the last day of the examination, you ought to consider that, if you are put out and agitated beforehand, you will not do yourself justice#x2014;you will make a fiasco to a certainty.""What are the biggest fiascoes and failures in our self-imposed toils and tasks to Minnie Rae, as she is lying now, as she may be lying to-morrow? Not worth a straw#x2014;not to be mentioned in the same breath," declared Delia, tragically. "Sarah, you will risk it," she maintained, with lofty solemnity, "or you will tell me at once, in order that I may ask some other girl to go with me.""Don't say another word, Charlotte," implored Sarah, "and don't, if you care the least bit for me, tell anybody who will interfere and get Miss Barret to stop us, as she may think it her duty to do.""Then you will endanger the success of your whole course at the Institute," Charlotte reproached her friend."It is our duty to our neighbour we have to consider," said Delia, loftily."It is poor, poor Minnie's life which may be at stake. I could never forgive myself if any evil which I could have prevented befell her. I am convinced mother and Dick will see it in that light when I am able to explain things to them. I will put out my cloak and thick boots to be ready, before the bell rings, and you will come and help me to change my dress, I am sure you will, Char.""What! help you to stand in your own light, and ruin all the prospects you have laboured for?" protested Charlotte—but that moment the bell rang.Delia and Sarah carried out their intention. There was ample warrant for their presence at the desolate little house in the village—that was one comfort. The boy Toby must have run away in sheer despair had he not been able to hope for the relief of their coming. The inefficient young nurse was braced and put on her mettle by Delia's natural instinct of leadership and command.But in other respects the pair who were risking their students' welfare could do little or nothing.Minnie was no longer to be calmed by Delia's taking the rule over her. For that matter, she hardly recognised Delia's voice. She was in a state of semi-unconsciousness, semi-delirium, calling feebly at intervals, when paroxysms of anguish roused her, for her Colin to come back and take her away from all her pain and misery.Minnie's former friends could only watch her in distress and dismay—could only pray with hidden faces to the Lord who rules all storms. Even Delia's masterful but reasonable spirit broke down, utterly subdued."Is she going to die, like Rae, Miss Wentworth?" whispered the boy Toby with quivering lips every time he could snatch an opportunity. "Poor Minnie! She was such a proud, merry little thing the last time I was here. I thought you and Miss Lyster might be able to do something for her." The boy in his grief was angry with their inability. "She trusted you—she was always wishing for you. Can you do nothing? Won't you try to do something?""How can we try? We might only do her harm. How can we tell whether she will live or die when we do not know any more than you do yourself? Perhaps it would be better for her if she did die,"said Delia—Delia, who was wont to be so hopeful and so helpful, now crushed by her helplessness."It is as God wills; but perhaps it is no kindness to wish her to live," said Sarah, with quivering lips."Life may be so terrible, as we have seen for ourselves within the last few weeks," resumed Delia; "and Minnie was never strong or self-reliant. She always wanted to be taken care of and protected; yet it has come to this!""Well, Jack and Tom and I are ready to take care of her as soon as we grow older and get on in the world," said Toby, a little resentfully, in his bewilderment and sorrow. "Rae was willing to work for her, and it was not his fault, poor chap! that he was drowned.""Certainly not," answered Delia, while she was forced to smile at Toby's manly esprit de corps. "When it comes to questions of life and death, we are none of us sufficient for these things,"she acknowledged humbly. "It is only God and Christ who can bind up the broken in heart, as well as tell the number of the stars."The dreary night, with its fever of agitation and its sickening alternations of hope and fear and piteous prayers, wore through. Happily, Dr Webb's assistant—not another blushing, quailing boy, but a man of energy and experience—arrived before it was too late.At the fairest period of a fine new day, when the dewy dawn was passing into the silvery brightness of early sunrise, poor Colin Rae's baby, the son on whom his mortal eyes never rested, was born. A living mother and a living child lay there, though for a space the current of death set in so strongly that Minnie had, in graphic common speech, to swim, with pathetic, unconscious effort, for her life.She touched the shore at last, and, with returning reason, said the word "baby" half doubtfully, half with a kind of heart-broken gladness. She asked if she had been dreaming, or if she had heard during the night girls' voices she knew, Delia Went-worth's and Sarah Lyster's, calling her back from she knew not where."I think she may do now, with care; it is a case which calls for great care, but I know a nurse who will just manage it, and I will wire to her to leave an A B C case, which can be easily looked after by somebody else, and come down by the first train,"said the doctor, examining his nails closely and standing with his legs wide apart.He was a brisk man, who delighted in overcoming difficulties, and exulted, as a doctor ought to do, in pulling his patients through the wood, no matter what he pulled them to—the last was not his business. He was also a bluff man, not given to paying compliments, but ready to render justice where there was so much as a crumb of it to render."I must tell you that you two young ladies did as little mischief as could have been expected under the circumstances. Nay, I can imagine you did my patient a modicum of good. You probably kept other people from behaving worse than they might have done; only, don't again put your fingers into a pie of which, as you are not medical students, you know next to nothing, and have only the light of nature—often a very delusive light—to guide you. But the poor thing certainly must have rallied a little when she caught the sound of your voices. Now go away and be thankful. Let well alone, and do not come here again till I give you leave. Presently Mrs Rae will be all the better for your company."Thus encouraged and snubbed and encouraged again, the girls, escorted by the now penitent Toby, crept home, thoroughly shaken and dead tired, so that their teeth chattered in the misty chill of the morning. In this condition Delia and Sarah were bound to face the last and most critical day of the examination, which they could not escape, though their powers were spent, their nerves unstrung and their pulses still thrilling and throbbing with vain sympathy and overwhelming dread.CHAPTER XIIMR SAM A WRATHFUL JUDGEWHEN the large household of St Catherine's discovered the errand on which Delia Went-worth and Sarah Lyster had gone, with a wasteful disregard of their own interests and those of the Institute, the girls were received with a perfect ovation of youthful enthusiasm and admiration, as if that could restore instead of farther overthrowing their tranquillity.It was like the inappropriate, disconcerting furore in the play-fields years before, when Mr Sam Ferrie had been discovered tramping solemnly homewards after endowing the Institute with a market garden, and "pretty Miss Millar" proposed to hail him with "three times three" from shrill girlish voices."Oh, how awfully good of you, you dears,"cried the chorus of girls circling round the pair and nearly carrying them off their feet. "What will you have to make you feel all right and as strong as giants after your kind deed? We are so glad you did it for all of us, though some of us do not even know poor Mrs Rae, and were never her husband's pupils. You have not caught cold, have you? Will you try a dose of quinine and ammonia?""No, no, eucalyptus is a thousand times better.""If I were you I would far rather swallow so many grains of antipyrine.""Can you drink strong tea—black with strength, I mean? You do look fagged, and it bolsters you up for an hour or two. Miss Grenfel keeps a private supply of the best black and green for refreshment in the small hours. Run, Nelly Grenfel, and bring your tea-caddy.""If you could only get them to eat a mutton-chop or a pound of steak each, that would be more sensible.""Ella, Ella, where is Ella Main waring? She has a can of the finest Danish butter in her cupboard, and she makes the most tempting, the most alluring, buttered toast—enough to make the mouth of an anchorite, or of a man fasting for a wager, water.""Yes, I vote for Ella's buttered toast and sardines, or shall it be potted shrimps, and coffee with not too much chicory in it?""Such rubbish!" Delia Wentworth stamped her foot with pure vexation. "We don't want to be crammed and made sick. There is nothing amiss with us. We only need to be left alone to rest and compose ourselves, and this is what you will not let us do. Go away all of you or you will send us out of our senses like—."Then a spasm passed over her face at the recollection of Minnie. She was near laughing and crying in the same breath at the anti-climaxes of life, at the small ironies which cross its great tragedies.Miss Barret alone had no word of commendation or even of excuse for the truants. She looked grave and said nothing. The credit of the Institute was at stake, and its most trusted pupils had not hesitated to endanger it.But this was not the time to find fault and expose the fallacy of the girls' view of the situation. The evil was no doubt done and would only be aggravated were she to take this moment to express her opinion and fulminate her censure. She saw that Delia and Sarah ate something to breakfast, and then she left them as they requested to be left, to recover themselves if they could.It was soon Sarah Lyster's turn to do her task before an observant circle in which figured conspicuously a head dressmaker from Madame Zóe's; a similar milliner from the house of Madame Zóe's rival, Madame Solange; a man of ability from Redfern's; a clever member of a clever firm of cloak providers that had lately taken the fashionable world by storm, together with various deeply-interested matrons and maidens, the female representatives of the Institute.Mr Ferrie and Miss Barret were also there along with a judicious selection of the more influential of the public who patronised the scheme.It was to the surprise of most of the spectators when Sarah advanced, looking as pale as a ghost and swaying a little as she walked, to the work-table on which a skirt was laid ready to be draped on a lay figure standing obligingly spread out in readiness to receive it.The figure had a sleeveless vest as part of its clothing with the intention of enabling Sarah to put in sleeves to the vest according to the last fashion.Then she was to crown her efforts by basting together a suitable cape, and trimming an untrimmed hat hanging on an adjoining hat-stand, and transferring it to the insensate straw poll of the figure."Dear me! how very nervous the poor girl looks. I hope she is not going to do anything so foolish and trying to witness as fainting," one lady relieved herself by saying audibly.Mr Sam stared as if he could not believe his eyes. What had Miss Lyster been doing to herself? She was one of his two trump cards in this year's Institute.He had let himself go so far as to speak of her in no measured terms to various influential individuals in the company, just as M. Paul had rashly exalted Lucy Snow in order to pique the slumbering pride and self-respect of her lazy, frivolous class-mates at Villette. Mr Sam Ferrie's face flushed with indignation and wrathSarah's trembling fingers manifestly could hardly hold a needle. Her eyes were dim, her head was throbbing as if her brain was an anvil on which an iron hammer was striking blow after blow.Her very judgment seemed to fail her. She feebly gathered together the folds of the skirt, as the merest tyro of a man could see she ought not to have done, dragged them here and there without being able to come to a conclusion apparently, and finally bunched and hung them in the most hopelessly lopsided, draggle-tail style.She put in one of the sleeves with the inner bend of the arm fitted to the elbow, while she failed to see her mistake. She ignored the stuff for the cape, and by the time she came to the hat she could do nothing more than twirl it fatuously, shake out the coil of riband aimlessly, and smile a distressed, semi-idiotic smile at the audience.There was a murmur of astonishment and displeasure, as if the judges and the improvised court felt they had been taken in and made fools of by the exhibition.The failure could be endured no longer. Mr Ferrie did not wait for the sentence of the outraged judges. He stood up in a white heat of anger and affront, altogether out of proportion to the provocation, unless in eyes which saw the Institute's honour and usefulness impugned and shaken to the foundations, as he saw the matter."Ladies and gentlemen," said Ferrie, passionately, "I must apologise for the blunder which has caused your valuable time to be wasted on a third year's student who has proved so incompetent as Miss Lyster has shown herself."There was a rustle amongst the girls in the audience, and a distressed exclamation, half under her breath, from Charlotte Kirby, "Oh! my poor Sally. I told you so."The President scowled at the interruption, and spoke again ruthlessly."I take blame to myself for having been misled into conceiving a totally different opinion of this student's abilities and attainments, for otherwise I should not have permitted this worse than useless expenditure of time and trouble. It cannot be helped now. I can only trust you will accept my heartfelt regret, and will consent to pass on to the remaining examinations in this department."Thus Sarah was condemned and dropped out of the category. She was fain to make her escape, sick and cold with shame and mortification, and tingling with remorse, which was yet not so much remorse as a despairing, rebellious sense that Fate, or Providence, and not poor Minnie Rae, had been against her. For she and Delia Wentworth could not possibly have done otherwise than they had done.Miss Barret caught Sarah's limp hand for a second as she passed, and whispered earnestly, " My dear, you know you can do it, though you have failed this once, and it is the ability to do and not the chance failure, however ill-timed, which is of consequence."But oh! what would Sarah's mother and Dick and Val Cheyne think and say of the disaster?The girls who were Sarah's special friends in the Institute were too scared by her collapse to intrude upon her. They felt with reason she would rather be left to herself while she bore the first brunt of her discomfiture and humiliation.Happily, Charlotte Kirby was summoned to her florist's shop by an extensive order which had come down from town for the most recherché floral decoration, an order from an illustrious patron which could on no account be neglected, even though it was the week of the exams., and one unhappy young woman was plucked and ploughed beyond reprieve.Sarah had a little grain of thankfulness in her heart for Charlotte's detention among; her flowers, since if she had been at liberty all her natural indocility, all her quarrel with mankind and womankind in general, would have broken out afresh; she would have set discipline at nought, and stormed herself, not less than Sarah, out of the Institute."As if it would have done me any good for Charlotte to have ruined herself on my account," Sarah had reflected.Miss Barret had given way to a momentary consoling impulse, but when she came to think over the affair not all her wonderful patience and forbearance, which lay at the root of her tact, and formed, quite as much as her dignity and firmness, the explanation of the success of her rule, could find any more to say to Sarah than, "I am exceedingly sorry, Miss Lyster, but you have provoked your punishment.""I know," acknowledged Sarah, brokenheartedly."You ought to have thought first of the credit of the Institute, and how grievously you would disappoint the President, before you set out on your quixotic expedition to sustain Mrs Rae." Sarah hung her head. "If you had complied with the rules of St Catherine's and had spoken to me before you went out, I should not only have stopped you from doing so foolish an act, I should have managed to go to Minnie Rae, supposing she had need of me, at any cost.""I beg your pardon, Miss Barret," said Sarah, penitently."You may well do it," answered Miss Barret, still severely. " Since for you and Miss Wentworth, on whom so much depended, to risk everything for an inconsiderable gain, if you could call it a gain, was—well, it was like the much vaunted generosity of youth, which very often means the gratification of a passing feeling at the expense of all which is owing to yourselves and to others, for years. "Sarah had not another word to say. "Do you not realise the cost to your poor mother, and no doubt the many sacrifices involved in meeting that cost, of keeping you for your full time at Chesnut Green? Do you not grudge the training which has been bestowed upon you?"It was a hard speech from so gracious a woman, but her heart was sore alike for the girl, for the boarding-house of St Catherine's, and for the Institute—so sore that she forgot her own words and her first estimate of the mischief, which was the right one.What the young woman had really learned would remain with her to the end of her life. Her knowledge had not been blotted out by that mauvais quart d'heure, when she had practised displaying her acquaintance with dressmaking as a public spectacle.Sarah might have defended herself by urging that she had not learnt the trade, to which she attached such importance, during these three years with the mere purpose of coming out with éclat in an examination and carrying off one of the first "classes" that were the head prizes at the Institute, as at the universities.But Sarah, though spirited, was not pugnacious, while her conscience responded to Miss Barret's reproaches, and her pride, if not her self-respect, had been laid in the dust. "I am very, very sorry, Miss Barret," was all she could falter farther. "I would beg your pardon and Mr Ferrie's a hundred times if that would be any good. I can only trust that Delia Wentworth will make up for my failure by doing a great deal better than I was able to do.""A great deal better, indeed!" Miss Barret could not help exclaiming with exasperation. "She would need to do infinitely better if we are to be regarded with any respect by the examiners. On the whole, this has been a mediocre year with the Institute examinations. The girls generally have only achieved a moderate success, and, as you will find for yourself, St Catherine's, which I had hoped would have been in the van, is for the first time, within my knowledge, decidedly in the rear of the performance."Then she told Sarah, with a refinement and ingenuity of cruelty only possible to the best and kindest of women driven to stand at bay for what is to her as the apple of her eye—namely, the honour and wellbeing of the Institute—"Miss Wentworth is not made of cast-iron any more than you are. On the contrary, she has a high-strung organisation liable to fits of complete prostration.""Oh, how I wish I had gone alone!" groaned Sarah, "that is, if she would have let me," she added, as a humble, truthful amendment.Miss Barret finished indignantly. "The probability is the effects of the fatigue and excitement of her last night's painful experience, coming after a period of strenuous effort, will not pass off in the course of a few hours, but will tell still more on her than on you, and you will have spoilt her chance as well as your own. It is quite likely that she will not be able so much as to appear before the examiners."Matters were not quite so bad. Delia would sooner have died than shirked a task by declining to take her place before a cooking-stove in the presence of the man from Gunter's, the Principal of the Kensington School of Cookery, the assistant cook from the Carlton Club, the French chef of the nearest great nobleman who could indulge in such a luxury.She felt, as she described it, "horribly tottery," with the woe-begone face of Minnie Rae ("pretty Miss Millar!"), the red, crumpled visage of the crying morsel representing poor Colin Rae's baby, even the lad Toby's accusing or else compunctious eyes constantly rising up before her in a perpetually changing phantasmagoria in the room of the stationary saucepans, dredging-boxes and egg switches which ought to have engrossed her attention.But determination was written on every feature of Delia's fine face, and as she tied on her cooking apron with precision and despatch, Mr Sam Ferrie and Miss Barret felt a spark of hope rekindled in their breasts.No, determination would not do everything. In Miss Wentworth's first undertaking, that of concocting a peculiarly distinguished and composite soup which meant a great deal of exact and delicate measurement, her swaying gait and shaking hands could not do their duty.If she had been allowed to follow what is sometimes called "the rule of the eye," sometimes "the rule of the thumb," combined with the intuition of genius, she might have come honourably through the ordeal, but weights and measures demand clear brains and an unerring hand.To her horror she found herself giving too much old port there, and here two little cream, two more teaspoonfuls of anchovy sauce than were called for, and so attenuated a pinch of dried herbs that its introduction could have made no impression on the contents of the tureen.The consequence was that those who tasted the soup dallied doubtfully with each spoonful. There was not death in the pot, but there was dire confusion in the elements it contained. None knew that better than the unhappy young cook, who was the cause of the jarring discord.Would she do better with the salad she was to prepare? She felt her heavily-taxed strength failing more and more. Her limbs could hardly support her, and who ever heard of an enthusiastic cook sitting down over pastry-board or salad-bowl? Her memory sympathised cruelly with her limp limbs. She was sensible too late that in the very beginning she had left out two highly essential ingredients. Should she give in? throw up the sponge as the Americans say, and be released from making a further spectacle of herself and her art?Just in time Delia caught a glimpse of Mr Sam's face us he turned away bending his brows and biting his lips. Actually his concern for the Institute and his distress at its defeat in its most promising pupils were telling upon him physically. He looked haggard and worn, contrasted with how he had looked even a couple of days before. It was very absurd, but it was true nevertheless.The sight gave Delia fresh strength and inspiration. She pulled herself together and shook off the deadly faintness and stupor which were creeping over her. She completed the salad creditably with the best substitutes she could find for omitted requisites.Then she attacked the composition of a mayonnaise with such fine insight and marvellous delicacy of taste and touch that she accomplished a result which betrayed the man from Gunter's into the enormity of smacking his lips, while the French chef put his hand to his heart and bowed low, in gallant acknowledgment of the achievement of a young lady who had equalled him in one of his masterpieces.It was doing something to atone for previous shortcomings, though Delia had no expectation that her last success would reverse the judgment on her earlier blunders. Indeed, she was incapable of taking any note of such puzzled relentings as might be experienced by the judges and the audience. For the first thing she did after her spirit had sunk down as suddenly as it had leapt up, was—to her inexpressible annoyance—to faint right away like any excited, emotional opera-singer or actress, the moment she had left the room.Happily she had left the room and was in comparative privacy, else every medical man in the place would have shaken his head in Burleigh fashion.The doctors would have talked—at once indignantly and weightily—of the undue strain on women's physique produced by the modern system of education—whether it applied to the pursuit of learning at the universities or to the technical teaching of trades at the Institute, with the view of rendering the recipients capable of playing their parts and securing their independence by taking their share of work and wages in the business of the world.The most of the examiners and the company in their wake departed at the close of the last day's examination. The crisis, whether in its business or in its festival light, was over. There was nothing more to do save to go for the Easter holidays.There was an exception made in the case of the third year's students who were leaving the Institute finally. These were understood to wait for the judge's sentences in the shape of "passes," classes," orders of merit and complimentary mention. These candidates left in the vacation to empty classrooms and workshops had nothing remaining for them to do save to turn back languidly to the ordinary routine and maintain it under halting circumstances.The pause of waiting for the verdict was, even in the most hopeful cases—and there were hopeless ones to be reckoned upon—a hard ordeal for women unused as yet to such trials. The pause was little short, in its intensity of suspense and apprehension, of the anguish of the prisoner during the jury's withdrawal to agree on their decision.But Delia and Sarah were determined they would put the best face on the situation which they had rendered doubly difficult. They would drink the full cup of their penalty to the dregs. They would neither sulk nor lead a party of protesting, defiant girls, adding a charge of insubordination to the original offence of the culprits who had only the other day been the favourites of the Institute.Delia and Sarah would own their error, solemnly declare that they had been fairly dealt with throughout, and that they had only themselves to blame for the collapse which was to signalise the end of their apprenticeship. It was painful to face the stiffness and coldness of the authorities, who were sensitively alive to the awkwardness of the position, whose resentment was not yet appeased.But the young women would bear it humbly and sorrowfully, and if Mr Sam should come down upon them and demolish them with snorts of rage and snarls of irony, why, they would endure that too, for it was no more than their deserts.On the contrary, when Sam Ferrie appeared on the scene he was in a condition of subdued mildness, even shamefacedness, which did not prevent him from taking the word out of Miss Barret's mouth when she made some distant allusion to the contretemps."Say no more about it. It was a misfortune which nobody could prevent. If I had been in the place of Miss Wentworth and Miss Lyster, I daresay I should have done the same—even at my age, Miss Barret, not to mention at theirs.""Impossible!" exclaimed Miss Barret.''That shows what a brute you think I am. Poor Rae's young widow, 'pretty Miss Millar' that was wont to be, and the brat of a baby hanging in the balance—I am here now to confess that there was no choice.""Oh, how good of you!" exclaimed the girls in one breath."It was a grim question," he went on, "but it had to be encountered, and the consequences have to be accepted. Don't let us make them worse than they need be by crying over spilt milk."'The Humane Society ought to give us a medal if the examiners will not award us honours," owned Miss Barret."And in the meantime, while we are on the qui vive for the evidence of disappointed hopes and blasted ambitions, I am going, on my own responsibility, to pack you off—you, Miss Delia, and you, Miss Sarah, with Mrs Rae and the brat when they are able to be moved—Webb says she is mending satisfactorily enough, but that a change will be the best thing for her, to the sanatorium cottage in Surrey. You will be as well going with her and the imp as eating your hearts out here.""Oh, we are so glad that you are not too angry with us to forgive us, Mr Ferrie," cried Sarah. "We will do anything, anything in the world that you bid us;" and she was unable to restrain a sob of inexpressible relief and heartfelt gratitude."I daresay you will, now, when it is too late," commented the gentleman, a little dryly.He was stopped by Delia, who went still further—Delia, who was accustomed to be self-controlled and cool to the verge of hauteur. She was as foolish as Miss Millar had been when she proposed to cheer the Great Mogul that day in the play-fields.Delia caught up one of his strong brown hands and kissed it fervently. It would have been difficult to say, after the extravagant action, whether she—drawing back abashed—or he—snatching away his hand and colouring high—looked the most put out by the irresistible demonstration.CHAPTER XIIITWO SECONDS WHICH OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN TWO FIRSTSTHE weeks spent in the sanatorium cottage in Surrey, on the edge of a great down where bracken and blackberries, gorse and heather prevailed, had the usual magical effect on the three young people sent to test its power.Two of them had gone there thoroughly dispirited, though loyally submissive, disposed to think that because they had failed, nay, as they were inclined to hold, had signally disgraced the whole Institute, the world was to be thenceforth a blank to them.The third, with infinitely more reason, knowing herself bereft and her baby left fatherless, possessing no better earthly guardian than her poor silly self, reckoned herself utterly broken in heart and fortune.Minnie was in a quandary whether to yield to the weakness which was still besetting her, sink betimes and die, rejoining her Colin, who must be yearning after her even in God's heaven; or whether to struggle against the insidious faintness, fight for life and battle weakly with the world's forces arrayed against her, because the most fragile panoply and the feeblest shield ordained by her Maker were better than none.If she gave way to her weariness and hopelessness, and deserted Colin's baby and hers, and took refuge in welcome death, then Colin, who was so brave and reverent, would greet her with reproachful eyes, because she had deserted her post, and left her task unfulfilled.He had got no choice save to go; but she—she might wrestle and pray and wear back to the life which was so barren and dreary without her lover, her husband. She could do it if his child was on her knee for her to rear as his father would have had him reared, the child whom Colin would not have deserted in selfish regard for his own welfare—had she been the one to die and he the one to live.And lo! the Surrey air was pure and fresh, the sky was blue, the sun golden, the grass green, the bell-heather budding, the bracken tawny. God was in heaven, all was well on earth, and it was good to live and do the Heavenly Father's bidding.Delia and Sarah called themselves two egotistical idiots, and could not sufficiently stone and lash themselves for their miserable conceit in thinking the world—the great world of myriads of planning, toiling, sorrowing, rejoicing men and women—had come to an end, even to two wretched, infatuated girls, because they had not taken first classes in an experimental technical institute.What a mere handful of human beings cared whether they succeeded or failed! What would it signify a hundred years hence whether they had conquered or been beaten?It did matter that they should be good and true, kind and merciful, in their small way servants of the most high God and of their Divine Elder Brother, but for anything else, worldly happiness or unhappiness, worldly honour or dishonour, they might surely leave it to Him in the light of the great issues of eternity.As for poor Minnie Rae, all that was soundest and sweetest in her rallied with her rallying forces under the tonic of change, a lovely country, kind companionship—above all, that of the little child committed to what she knew was her childish keeping. Meek resignation took the place of feeble beating against the bars and kicking against the pricks.She thought more and more of how good Colin Rae had been, how manly, honest and earnest, how religious in heart and life without pharisaical loudness of profession and elaborate outward show. As she contemplated his virtues,—a dim reflection of a greater example, her own nature grew stronger and higher in the contemplation. She became surer and more sure that neither his worth nor his love could die, that they were preserved intact for her within the veil. She began to have a fuller trust that her God and Colin's would not suffer her and her baby to perish.Minnie's disposition happily was naturally grateful and trustful. She was convinced that everybody had been as kind as kind could be to her in her affliction, and that they would do their best for her. She relied with implicit, artless faith on the good offices of Mr Sam Ferrie and Miss Barret.Delia and Sarah, in their robust youth and independence, could have wished that Minnie Rae would show more self-resource and self-reliance, but they could not see it their duty, or find it in their hearts to assail her stronghold of humble dependence and lay it low before her wistful, scared eyes.Minnie was so far warranted in her confidence in her elder friends that before returning to Chesnut Green she heard from Mr Ferrie that, acting in her interest, he had disposed of the furniture which Colin Rae had gathered with anxious calculation for the bridal home—of which Minnie had been for a couple of years the proud and happy mistress. She would have no present use for the furniture, while its immediate sale would produce a little sum which, however small, was better than nothing and could be invested profitably for her and the child.To this Minnie listened and assented—she was not given to contradictions—with quivering lips and bowed head.In the meantime, Miss Barret had consented to receive Mrs Rae as a subordinate superintendent of St Catherine's Boarding-house, and to take the baby along with his mother.The idea of Minnie as enforcing rules and controlling grown-up young women was little short of grotesque.But as Miss Barret said incontestably to the President, she—Minnie Rae—would be always growing older, and, they might trust, wiser; soon there would be no boarder left who could recall her as "pretty Miss Millar," who had been entangled in an inopportune love affair, and in the course of her extrication by the usual approved method, had been seized with hysterics night after night in precincts sacred to superior sense and higher technical education.Surely Minnie could show visitors over the boarding-house, write notes, look over washing bills, and do a little deputy marketing when required. Anyhow, there was no other opening for the poor young thing and her baby.Minnie was an old pupil of the Institute; she was the widow of one of its faithful and esteemed servants; she should not be turned adrift with her infant or thrown back on meagre gratuities extorted from distant relatives as indifferent as they were distant.Miss Barret would willingly agree to the curtailment of her salary by a slice sufficient to defray additional expenses.Mr Sam Ferrie would contribute from his private purse for the same end."We are very glad that you are to be at St Catherine's again, Minnie, for the short time that we are to remain there," said Delia, kindly.Sarah cried what a comfort it was that Minnie was not to be suffered to drift away into the outer world, carrying with her the precious baby who had paid them the compliment of growing and thriving when they were all together in Surrey. Sarah would not lose the chance of ever seeing him again, before he knew her from Adam, as his Uncle Toby had been in the habit of complaining.Minnie, remembering that her own hearth was cold, and that no dear familiar footstep would come there ever more, found a ray of comfort in taking refuge amidst the wellknown surroundings at St Catherine's.It had been arranged that Minnie and the girls should return to Chesnut Green on the eve of the issue of the examiners' reports. Delia and Sarah had told themselves repeatedly that they were now prepared to face the worst with commendable philosophy.But when the pair were told that the momentous papers had arrived, were posted in academical fashion on the doors of the respective shops and workrooms, and that Delia Wentworth and Sarah Lyster's names figured in the entries, the young women's hearts beat tumultuously.It did not matter that Delia and Sarah heard in the same breath, from the eager tongues which brought the news of the exhibition of the reports, the gist of the entries. Nothing would satisfy the two chiefly concerned till they had read—first on one door and then on another—their sentences.Taking into consideration the entire satisfactoriness of the Institute's three years' reports, and of the answers given to set questions, with the other evidence shown during the first days of the examinations of competent knowledge and highly creditable attainments on the part of Sarah Lyster, pupil-apprentice of the Institute, the examiners felt themselves compelled to come to one conclusion. It was that the last day's breakdown of the candidate for honours had been the result of untoward circumstances.It was not within the province of the examiners—looking to the risk of establishing undesirable precedents—either to condone the final failure, or to deal with whatever circumstances occasioned it—so treating them as a factor in the examiners' decision. But this they felt warranted in doing: they awarded a second-class certificate which, had the last day's examination turned out differently, would have been a first class to Sarah Lyster.The award to Delia Wentworth was in nearly identical terms."They have been a great deal better to us than we deserved, for you know, Sarah, we did act like two idiots in collapsing so shamefully," said Delia, candidly. "But I do not quite like to be indebted to an act of forbearance, and to have charitable allowance made for me," and Delia made a wry face."Oh, my dear Delia!" cried Sarah, "beggars should not be choosers. Don't stand out on a trifle. It is true that in your circumstances a class or a certificate does not matter much, and that a second-class sounds a mere paltry concession. But if you could only understand the difference it makes to me, and how thankful my mother and Dick and all who are interested in me will be for small mercies, you would not despise acts of forbearance and charitable allowance made for our failures.""Do you see a name in another depart-ment? And a first-class, I declare!" Delia suddenly interrupted her friend, speaking enviously."Charlotte Kirby! Oh, I am glad!" exclaimed Sarah, with unaffected warmth."But she won't care," objected Delia; "such plebeian distinctions are thrown away on her.""No, no, you are mistaken," insisted Sarah. "You do not know her as I do. I wish she had been here, and that I had been the first to tell her. It may be some consolation to her. I don't think you have heard, Delia, that while we were away in Surrey, Charlotte was summoned home on account of her father's dangerous illness and that he has died in the interval.""Oh, poor thing, of course I had not heard!" exclaimed Delia, looking contrite because of the light and tartly disparaging way in which she had just spoken of Charlotte, whom heavy affliction had set aside and raised above light and tart discussion.After all, these Institute girls—especially those under Miss Barret's influence—were still genuine and unsophisticated specimens of young womankind. To them, joy continued to be joy, and grief, grief. When they heard of such family events as the birth of a baby, the return of the member of a family who had been long absent, the engagement or marriage of a daughter, their innocent imaginations immediately leapt up to all conceivable gladness, to dainty bassinettes, welcome-homes, engagement rings, and wedding favours.In like manner to the young women death meant bereavement and desolation. They had not learnt the modern practice of ingeniously analysing and theorising, twisting and reversing until black is white and sweet, sour.According to such morbid subtleties, as the rule and not the exception, a child is an undesirable encumbrance; a returned relative is an unwarrantable and unacceptable intruder; an engagement followed by a marriage is the conclusion of a mercenary bargain in which the sentiments excited are anything rather than blissful and tender. Death is a relief from irksome obligations, possibly the entering on the possession of the share of this world's goods with which the prodigal heir may do as he will.The girls at Chesnut Green had not arrived at the advanced stages of worldly civilisation which gave currency to such ideas. Grief was still held sacred at St Catherine's. It was regarded as a phase of mind which was neither to be doubted nor ridiculed, nor got rid of as soon as it was decent by any means in the power of the mourner or her friends.Charlotte reappeared at St Catherine's in order to collect together and remove her personal belongings. She was in all the sombreness of unrelieved black, enhancing the colourlessness of her face. (For the letter of mourning has not been dispensed with, however the spirit may have been tampered with.)And, as it happened, the chief authorities at Chesnut Green and St Catherine's, who knew life and were middle-aged, still believed, as they had believed in their youth, in the essential elements of joy and grief, and gave them their due, while the young people under authority were led by their chiefs.The other girls looked upon Charlotte with a species of awe, because she had become acquainted with an experience which they, too, must know in their day, but from which in anticipation they drew back with strong reluctance and awed reverence. They would not even venture to congratulate her on her first-class, because she had lost her father and congratulation might sound a cruel mockery to her.Charlotte was very grave without being her old sardonic self. She talked chiefly to Miss Barret, which was natural in the circumstances, but that there was a change in Charlotte was shown by her unusual patience with Minnie Rae and her blunders.Minnie and Charlotte had something in common in their recent bereavements, though these bereavements were widely different in their nature and in its far-reaching results. Colin Rae had fallen in the first flush of his manhood. He had been snatched away with his race not half run, and his work little more than begun. Mr Kirby was an old man who had long ago played out his part in the active business of the world. His children were grown up around him. He had been, as it were, standing aside, looking on at the struggles of a younger generation, and waiting for the summons to take his departure.But to Minnie, death was simply death, whether it struck the young or the old. It was the black blot on creation, which only the immortality that the Son of God promised could wipe out. It was the blow, the robbery which otherwise was without remedy, that clothed Charlotte and her in mourning garments, and saddened their young faces. Therefore, she clung about Charlotte, and plied her with such ministrations as had been found suitable for her—Minnie—in a manner in itself trying to the self-restrained, reserved young woman.But though Charlotte got no comfort from a shawl or a footstool, from cups of beef-tea and glasses of milk brought to her at odd hours, she put them from her with unwonted gentleness, and thanked Minnie instead of snapping at her.However, it was in her room with Sarah Lyster that the ice of Charlotte's sorrow melted, her poor, set, little white face began to work, until she flung her arms round her friend's neck, and fairly sobbed on her shoulder."Oh! Sally, dear old Sally, it is not for grief I'm crying. I am not so heartless and thankless. Father was in such pain, and he was so weary, that though he loved us, he could not but long for the only relief and rest which could come to him. He was quite conscious, and though the news that I had taken a first class barely arrived in time, he somehow anticipated it, for he spoke of it, and held out his hand for every paper he saw, thinking it was the certificate arrived at last.""Poor soul!" Sarah sympathised with her friend."He said I had gratified his dying wish, and that his mind was at peace where I was concerned. I am so glad, so very glad of it. If it had not been for you, Sally, I should not have come to Chesnut Green, or I should not have stayed after I had come.""Yes, dear, and it is a comfort for you to have come and stayed when Mr Kirby was anxious for it, and when you have done so well," said Sarah, rather vaguely. She was pleased that Charlotte should have this crumb of consolation, but she was puzzled to understand why Mr Kirby, a successful business man, should set such store on distinction for his daughter in this quarter.Charlotte spoke in answer to Sarah's unspoken thoughts. "There was great reason that father should care. He had continued a sleeping partner in his old firm, which has met with several severe losses in bad trade lasting long. Father feared worse was coming, and it has come.""He has not been ruined, I hope." Sarah earnestly sought to deprecate the last statement."Not altogether, but mother and Gladys will have nothing, except what was secured to mother by her marriage settlement, to trust to in future. There was the greatest call for one of us to be self-dependent, and to provide for herself. Only the worst of the storm was just threatening three years ago when I came here. The absolute necessity might never have arisen, and I am sure he thought it would be harder for me, for all of us, if he had spoken out plainly then.""But Mrs Kirby will not be so very poor," suggested Sarah; "there will be enough for you to share with her and your sister. You—you are as much entitled to your portion as Gladys is," she fired up indignantly after a moment's hesitation."Oh, you don't know, you don't understand," said Charlotte, with a wan and wintry smile. "Mother and Gladys could not live without pinching, could not live as they have been accustomed to do if I were with them doing nothing.""But you could earn a little money, and increase the family income."Charlotte shook her head."It is not to be thought of that I should do anything while I was with them; mother would never hear of that. They have got used to my being away, only I think father never got used, for I had been his companion and pet since I was a child, while mother and Gladys are so much alike in their tastes that they are always happy and comfortable together. I don't wonder mother likes to have Gladys with her, for, you know, Sally, I am rather difficult to live with.""I never found any difficulty," said Sarah, stoutly."Mother and Gladys are going abroad immediately," went on Charlotte, "and probably they will stay abroad, for they both like Continental ways, and their income will go much further in Germany or Italy than here.""Then you will come to us the first thing," said Sarah, promptly.She thought as she spoke what an evil poverty was after all. Here was she unable to say from the bottom of her heart to poor Charlotte—her old friend, whose bark was so much worse than her bite, who had so many more sterling qualities than were possessed by the kindred who cast her adrift without scruple, "Come to us for good and all. Your father befriended my mother; it is our turn now, let us befriend you, and we shall count ourselves the obliged persons."If Sarah could but have said that, she would have felt she was acting like a true friend. But poverty made use of her mother's narrow income, of Dick's unsold pictures, of Sarah's own uncertain future, with nothing better than a second-class certificate from the Institute, and closed her mouth.Charlotte had nourished no expectation of anything so munificently reckless on Sarah's part, as what would have been equivalent to an offer of adoption of her—Charlotte—by the Lyster family.She could sincerely thank Sarah for her kind invitation within limits, and tell her that Mr Sam Ferrie, in the name of the Institute and Emporium, and Miss Barret, in that of St Catherine's, had asked her to come back and stay there on any occasion during which she was free for a short time. When she had a long holiday she must go and see what her mother and Gladys were doing.Withal, Charlotte would be only too pleased to visit Sarah when her conscience would permit her to take the solace. But she must think of her work first. She must try to make a good start before she allowed herself to mention a holiday."How and where are you to start?" inquired Sarah, with a dim vision of Covent Garden and florists' shops floating before her eyes. "Tell me what you propose to do—in what way you mean to begin? "Sarah continued to ask, with eager interest."Mr Ferrie and Miss Barret have arranged it for me. I do not know how to be sufficiently grateful," Charlotte answered sedately. "You remember the Grainger girls, Janet and Violet, who completed their 'tripos,' as Miss Wentworth calls it, a year ago?""Yes, yes, I remember them very well," replied Sarah."They were come of a yeoman stock, and their uncle, a yeoman farmer whose cornfields and pasture lands have not been paying well lately, has started a fruit farm in Hertfordshire, within an easy distance of London. He has engaged his nieces, Janet and Violet, to help him with the management. They have decided to unite vegetables and flowers with the fruit, and have offered me the post of making up and arranging the flowers.""Capital! and what a good thing for them as well as for you—I congratulate both sides," cried Sarah, warmly. "Janet and Violet were a little rustic, but they were well-principled, well-intentioned girls, I believe ladies at heart. They have shown their sense and discrimination, and their freedom from small jealousies in seeking you out, Char. I am sure you will find them friendly if you will meet them half way," she finished wistfully."I am grateful to them, Sarah," said Charlotte, simply, as if that were enough; and then she added, with a half rueful, half humorous shake of the head, "Don't you know my days of being 'stuck up' and giving myself airs are over?""It will be far healthier and nicer for you than arranging flowers on behalf of a London florist." Sarah hastened, with instinctive delicacy, to take up another branch of the subject. "You will be in the country even more than you were here at Chesnut Green. I think a market garden in the real country must be the next thing to the Garden of Eden."CHAPTER XIVTHE BREAKING-UP PARTY AT ST CATHERINE'S BOARDING-HOUSEMISS BARRET was in the habit of celebrating the advent of the summer holidays by a breaking-up party to her students, a party which included the officials of the Institute as well as the students of St Catherine's, such friends of the students as they cared to invite, deputations from the other boarding-houses, etc., etc.Mr Sam Ferrie as a rule paid Miss Barret and her students the compliment of being present. At intervals the breaking-up party had more significance. This was when, as might happen, a considerable number of the girls had completed their third year, stayed on for their certificates, and were at last leaving finally.In the year in question, Delia Went-worth, Sarah Lyster, Charlotte Kirby, and a good many other girls whose names have not found their way into these pages, had finished their course of instruction, and were going out into the world. Miss Barret was anxious to do them honour and give them pleasure. She desired that their last night at St Catherine's and Chesnut Green should make an abidingly agreeable impression on the young wayfarers who were on the eve of departure from its familiar precincts.The probationers' time of trial and preparation was over; they were now to go into the world, enter its lists, engage without protection or partiality in its hard, unvarnished warfare, and put to practical proof the value of their apprenticeship and the worth of the weapons which had been, if not forged, certainly beaten into shape, sharpened, polished and pointed in the Institute.The girls enjoyed this gathering immensely. They cast aside, and seemed to forget for a time, their special aims and struggles as students. They were mere girls again, anticipating and promoting an exceptional pleasure, to be enjoyed all the more heartily because it was exceptional, a break in the routine of work and care.Many of the girls were loyally bent on helping Miss Barret to show to the representatives of other boarding-houses, the teachers, the stray visitors from the outer world, what a festive character could be lent by zealous effort and cordial co-operation to the generally rather sober and simple drawing-room.These girls banded themselves together as Miss Barret's aides-de-camp, her staff of attendants, and very nice-looking and efficient attendants they were.Some of them had walked miles to find sufficiently tall ferns and foxgloves, and to fish up an abundance of stately water-lilies from outlying ponds in the neighbourhood, in order to contribute a finishing touch to the floral decorations of the hall, the staircase, and the various rooms pressed into the service of the guests.Other girls brought down all the stores of art materials, brackets, screens, fans, flower-glasses, lamp shades, photographs, Liberty stuffs, with which, in the spirit of the age, the owners were fond of decorating their particular dens.These treasures were employed, as far as Miss Barret's saner taste would allow, in draping and metamorphosing doors, windows, mantelpieces, and mirrors, with every nook and corner susceptible of such treatment, till the place did not know itself.It was an outbreak of sheer girlish womanliness, flimsy and fantastic if you will, since nothing costly was permitted on such occasions, but whose pretty, fanciful gracefulness, and sheer youthful energy and enthusiasm it did Miss Barret's heart good to see."They are not dawdles or slovens, my girls," said Miss Barret to herself, with hearty self-congratulation, "though they dress with that first sine quâ non of good dressing, simplicity and suitability to the season and the situation, and don't waste their time on thinking of nothing else but their dress. Some of them are to be clerks and accountants, and some dairywomen—even washerwomen, like Nausica; but they are women before all." Once more Miss Barret gave way to pleasant reflection."My girls will take pride and delight in their homes to as great a degree, although in a different way from their grandmothers. They will embroider their fathers', brothers', and husbands' smoking-caps—for no man deigns to wear worked slippers nowadays—and make their children's pinafores, and knit their socks, and have lace frills to the babies' cots, and tie them with ribands as fondly as ever."Delia Wentworth and her subordinates in her particular line would have willingly done all the cooking for the supper, etc. They would have out-done and exhausted themselves in contriving recherché dainties.Other girls who were in training as waiters would have undertaken all the waiting, and would not have left themselves a moment to spare for personal entertainment.But it was Miss Barret's unalterable rule that no girl should be engaged in her own calling for this farewell party. It was to be play with each guest. If she chose to play at making herself useful in someone else's business she might if she liked, but she must not meddle with her own.The decorations were a labour of love contributed by all in the house, and when they were completed the whole company set themselves to be busy about nothing save making themselves happy.Miss Barret was quite as much interested and gratified as the girls were. Her power of sympathising with them was one of her great holds over them. She looked round on bright faces and lithe figures, clad appropriately for the night in the nearest approach possible to the silken sheen or airy texture of full dress. It showed white necks and round arms—on which glittered a jewel or two, here and there, while the girls' hair was generally more fully and elaborately dressed than was usual when womanly order and neatness were the sole indispensable obligations."What will become of them all, poor, dear, young things?" speculated Miss Barret to herself, in a series of forecasts. "Some of their lives will end long before the lives of the others, or will pass into the shade betimes, like that of poor Minnie Rae, who cannot be present to-night. That goes without saying, and the others—will they find the dusty highway of life and the battle for bread too arduous a course?"Will they look back on their stay at Chesnut Green as an oasis in the desert? or will they, finding regular work a sore drudgery, with little to be gained by it, and the great world looking on coldly and scornfully at the struggle, ' knock under' and seek some apparently easier way of sycophancy and of hanging on to richer relatives and friends, in order to procure a living?"Will some of my girls marry for money, or even if they love their husbands and the money is only a lucky accident, will they grow lazy and self-indulgent, looking down on girls who have to earn their living, treating them as the beggar, turned porter, of the proverb treats his quondam friend the beggar?"I hope not, for then—and it will be the least of the evils which would befall them—they will hate to remember Chesnut Green. They will feel mortally ashamed of ever having had anything to do with us and our Institute and Emporium. They will seek to drive us out of their minds as completely as they can. But, anyhow, they will be less helpless women than when they came to us. They will have one resource to fall back upon, should their support fail them."In the meantime Sarah Lyster and Delia Wentworth had withdrawn themselves from the music and dancing and games, from the walking up and down meeting everybody the girls knew and exchanging small talk with each. The pair stood together in one of the bow windows, and said how strange it would be to find themselves away from St Catherine's and Chesnut Green, with all their multifarious, engrossing interests, to-morrow and for many to-morrows. The two exchanged mutual confidences."I am afraid," said Delia Wentworth, thoughtfully, "I shall have a little difficulty with my people. You see, we are rich people, and none of the others take kindly to the idea of a girl's working for herself, unless she is compelled by dire necessity.""That is still a common prejudice," said Sarah."Yes, but now, the thing I should hate above all others would be not to have work to do and to lead a lazy, dilettante life. There are four of us girls at home, so that mother does not want me to help her with her social duties. My sister Bertha works under our vicar, and does our share of parish work.""Ah! that is not considered disparaging work," remarked Sarah, with a slight smile."Besides"—Delia pursued her own line of thought—" I have a conscientious scruple against taking up religious teaching and philanthropy—not because good words and works are wanted, and have been enjoined upon us, not because I have a special aptitude for district visiting or Sunday School teaching, but simply as a last resource.""As an occupation for an idle woman and as an amusement?""Yes, to save me from dying of ennui me with some kind of interest and entertainment. Sarah, do you believe that any girl can make a fit lay helper in a parish just because she has nothing else to do? She may have no genius or inspiration for the task"—no ' vocation,' as Roman Catholics call it"—while others speak of it as a divine command to be followed, a sure path laid down for her.'"No, I do not think she can do real good if she is neither qualified nor commissioned to take up the work. Every honest, good girl, I am sure, ought to discover what is the line of usefulness for her, and to follow it with all her heart.""But everyone is not fitted to distinguish herself and do good service (in fact, she is more likely to do a considerable amount of harm) by attempting a performance for which she is totally unsuited," asserted Delia."It is"—Sarah tried an illustration—"as if Mary, who could not work like Martha, in place of waiting to be reproached by her sister for her choice of the better part, should have thrust herself into Martha's rôle or as if Martha had left her serving and sought simply to listen like Mary, without Mary's capacity for listening, so that both sisters, and not one only, might have incurred the Master's rebuke.""Do you know," said Delia, "I don't like the idea of vacant-minded, empty-headed girls and women, however well-intentioned, being pressed into the ranks of district visitors and workhouse readers, and called upon to advise and guide their broken-down seniors, granted they are poor people. It is a small compliment to the intelligence and sincerity of hard-headed if beaten men and women to offer them incapable counsellors. They cannot have the smallest acquaintance, unless at second-hand, with the trials and temptations of the unfortunate persons whom the mentors unhesitatingly undertake to direct.""I suppose a little sympathy goes a great way," reflected Sarah. "But how did you happen to drift here, Delia, if your people were against your having a career—the word which everybody puts in that incredible monstrosity—the new woman's mouth?""Oh! it was simply in the nature of an experiment, and as one of my elder brothers—the barrister one—was intending to go into Parliament, he took it into his head that I might supply him with a few ' wrinkles' in the direction of political economy, and act as a link between him and the masses. I must say I envy you, Sarah, since you have to work for yourself. Nobody can suggest to you that you ought to be content to sit with your hands in your lap 'like a lady,' as the washerwomen say. It is all plain sailing with you.""Is it?" asked Sarah, a little disconso-lately. "I am not so sure of that. You see, I have not taken a first class in dressmaking. I may not easily get such a situation as would relieve poor mother, and pay her for the strain on her means caused by keeping me here. Dick does what he can, but in the meantime he is far from being a famous painter with all the picture-dealers at his heels.""Art is not money-making unless it is very great, not even then, frequently. Its best chance (no great distinction) is when it succeeds in getting a boom, and 'catches on' to some idle fancy or passing 'rage' indulged in by a wooden-headed public," said Delia, indifferently."Dick is thinking of trying a trip to Australia for new inspiration and new effects," said Sarah, wistfully. " He says he could do it in the style of Oliver Goldsmith, when he made his way through Holland by playing a tune on his flute to every good - natured, musically - inclined 'vrow,' in return for supper and a bed. Dick would paint the bush stations, with separate portraits of each ' boss,' in discharge of his bill for the week's board and lodging.""I like your brother Dick," said Delia, carelessly; "he is never down on his luck, as some men are when they bet on the wrong horse at Epsom or Goodwood. He puts a bright face on everything. It is better than a fortune to be a philosopher and not a cynic. Are we all going to be cynics presently, Sarah? Must we, in order to be in the fashion, sneer or scoff, and be called epigrammatic for our pains?""Some of us have neither the will nor the wit," said Sarah, modestly. "But I for one shall never regret spending three years at Chesnut Green, though I have not done all which I hoped to do and might have done.""Which of us has done all she hoped to do and could have done?" cried Delia. "As for regret, I trust we could never be such dolls, such ingrates—though, of course, there are a great many fools in the world—as to regret coming to the place where we have learned our trades in a really workmanlike manner, and in no amateur fashion; where we have had the happiness to be able to work at them every day and all day.""We have had nothing to do save to learn," said Sarah. "There has been no-body to interpose, to bid us stop, to call us away. We have had no responsibility, no distraction; we have only had each other's companionship to lure us on and serve as a stimulus to excel.""We have had abundance of recreation for our bodies and minds," said Delia, "so that there has been no danger of our growing up lopsided.""It has been like heaven on earth," pronounced Sarah, "and nobody regrets dwelling for a season in heaven.""I shall remember Chesnut Green as men remember their universities and colleges," Delia pledged herself. "I was fond of Girton, but Chesnut Green is more practical and larger minded.""I was never at Girton, but it is to Chesnut Green that I shall always look back as to my dear, dear alma mater, where I acquired such knowledge, and made such friendships, and had such work and play as I can never hope to see surpassed.""Where we have been young and light of heart and full of hope as we can never expect to be again, not though we live to the age of Methuselah and are as lucky as Fortunatus," wound up Delia."Hear! hear!" applauded Sarah. She was a member of a debating society, the members of which had found the exclamation ready made, and had learned to bandy it about on all occasions.CHAPTER XVTHE APPOINTMENT OF A MANAGERSARAH LYSTER was back in her old home. She was glad to be with her mother and Dick again, and yet sorry for what appeared to be vanishing like a dream—not only her happy life at Chesnut Green, but the high hopes and ambitions she had entertained when she dwelt there.She was not idle. Her friends and acquaintances, and the little world she knew in her suburb, experienced no small curiosity as well as some goodwill where she was concerned. They wondered how a gentlewoman like Sarah Lyster would execute their commissions, and they were inclined to try patronising her, partly out of self-complacence, partly out of kindliness.But these commissions were too desultory and fragmentary to pay well, while they were not of a nature to invest Sarah with the wholesome influence over the women's dress of her generation which she had longed and craved to exercise while still at Chesnut Green.Sarah had not been stamped with the hall-mark of a great success. She had not the prestige either of public opinion or of delegated authority. Her customers, instead of deferring to her opinion and putting any faith in her judgment, were inclined to dictate to her and overrule her, until it was with the greatest difficulty that Sarah could keep from reckoning herself a professional simpleton and failure. This was the light in which it was clear her neighbours regarded her.Nay, she began to entertain a depressing fear that the more intelligent, wise and modest she showed herself, the more probable it was that she would injure herself in the eyes of those gregarious flocks of women to whom fashion—the more fantastic, the more grievously short-sighted and grossly imprudent the better—was everything. It came far before propriety, a noble simplicity, a fine economy, and a reverent regard for God's natural laws in the human body.Sarah had already lost some of her limited customers by trying to impart to them a juster, more correct, taste. She would fain have had them more reasonable. She longed to make them more sensible of the responsibility which lay upon them not to waste their health and strength and means, not to tempt others to be equally prodigal by complying with, and pushing to the extreme, practices which were unsafe as well as absurd.Why would these girls and women impoverish their fathers and husbands by squandering their hard-won earnings on unwarrantable excess in sumptuousness and so-called exquisiteness of attire? Why would older women, matrons, spinsters, grandmothers, degrade themselves by aping the follies, instead of checking the vagaries, of a younger generation?Sarah might make her way, but it would be very slowly. In the meantime, what was to become of her fine projects, not only of regenerating woman's dress, but of Putting Mrs Lyster beyond the reach of care and anxiety and of being a stand-by to Dick?Her mother and brother were only too glad to have Sarah back in their little household, with her sense and spirit, her thought for them still more than for herself. So far from bearing any grudge against her because she had not carried off a first class, and was not proceeding forthwith to lay the foundation of a fortune for her and their benefit, Mrs Lyster had the good opinion of Sarah which most worthy, kindly mothers cherish of their children if there is a scrap of foundation for the opinion.Mrs Lyster failed to see that Sarah had done anything to forfeit her mother's confidence—quite the contrary. She would have been dreadfully disappointed in Sarah if the girl had put her chance of taking a first class before the extremity of a fellow-creature, a companion, a girl like Sarah's self only the other day, and next a poor young widow, doomed to meet her hour of anguish and peril unsupported by husband or mother.Dick had not taken a first class in anything, though he was a fair student and had good hope of being a decent painter in time. It did not become him to turn up his nose at his sister because she had not eclipsed him. But if Sal, who had ten times his "go" and application, did not come up to the mark in her line, where was the shame of his falling short in his business?Everybody was not constituted to be first-class men and Michael Angelos, though Dick did mean to be a creditable, far-away Constable or Corot. Val Cheyne had been a prizeman in one of the Academy years, and much good it did to the poor chap, with his high art and his serious drama! He had no more capacity for coming out in a pretty little bit of sentiment or comedy, such as the British Philistine liked, than if he had been the dunce of his class.It was Sarah herself who grew despondent, and went about in her leisure hours blaming herself, blaming the world, even blaming Dick, unkindest, most undeserved cut of all."Dick," Sarah attacked her brother, "you are not one of the men who go about proclaiming that they like their women to be well dressed, and that they hate frights and dowdies, are you?""I won't own to proclaiming, but I do hate frights and dowdies," asserted Dick, sturdily. "If you want to make guys of women, Sally, they won't let you, and I'm glad they won't.""I make guys of women!" cried Sarah, indignantly. "It is they who make guys of themselves, and are angry with me because I try to stop them. You don't hate frights and dowdies more than I do. The art of dressing is my art, to which I am willing to devote my days and nights.""Well, if you don't make them guys, my dear, you want to make them unlike other people, and the poor things don't care to be oddities. How can you expect it of them? There is a recognised law of fashion for every generation, which we must obey, otherwise we must submit to be gazing-stocks.""For every generation, do you say, Dick? For every season, for every month. I don't deny the law, or propose to rebel against it more than I can help. I know it is, like the voice of public opinion, too strong to be resisted altogether, unless for grave reasons.""I am glad you have so much sense, Sallikin.""Besides, fashion has its good side. No, Dick, I would only check and modify fashion; if I ever contradicted it flatly it would be in the interest of the old, the very young or the ailing. But when you men talk and write—there is a good deal of dressmaking and millinery, generally of a false, meretricious kind, in men's as well as in women's books to-day—with regard to women being well dressed, it is not at all what I mean by the term.""Is it not?" asked Dick, innocently."I mean being becomingly and fitly clad according to the age and station of the wearer, and according to the season of the year. Fitness, Dick, fitness is the one essential in all good dressing."Dick sat up from a recumbent posture he had taken on the square of grass which formed the Lyster's back-green, removed a pipe from his mouth, and stared at Sarah in well-counterfeited alarm."What have I done to provoke such an attack? My good sister, if I do not show fitness in my apparel—in my tight coat in this frizzling August, for instance, or in the chimney-pot hat I have to wear on high days and holidays, which scores a red line across my noble forehead as if it were drawn in preparation for my being scalped—you cannot imagine that I am in fault as the chosen arbiter in the great question of men's dress?""Every man and woman is an arbiter," insisted Sarah."I do at Rome as the Romans do, and bear the penalties like a Roman. I keep my blouse for my studio, and I never indulge in a gorgeous cummerbund unless at a crack cricket or tennis match.""Modify what the Romans do, Dicky. Have the moderation and sagacity to avoid, at least to qualify, their extremes of evildoing. Have the courage of your opinions; be yourself, your individual self, even if you are a little original.""I will do your bidding, Sister Sarah,"answered Dick, with mock solemnity."Then never, oh! never, if you love me, Dick, be so left to yourself as to call a woman well dressed when it means a pinched - in waist, squeezed toes, with temples, ears and throat exposed to all the winds which blow. This is in order that she may figure among her kind with a bow of riband or a cluster of flowers for a bonnet, stockings of silk or thread, and boots with pointed toes, high heels and wafer soles, when she ought to be wearing a bonnet or hat which will protect her head and eyes, merino or lambswool stockings, and shoes made with some regard to the shape of the human foot, and to the condition of our streets and roads in winter, especially when she is not the fortunate possessor of a carriage.""I thought women went in for tailor-made gowns, plain, straight and severe," said Dick, knowingly."Don't you be deceived, like a silly boy," Sarah warned him, "by a tailor-made gown, trim and taut, but designed to be worn without a sufficiently warm jacket and with as little underclothing as propriety will permit.""There is a man who has the courage of his opinions," said Dick, indicating with a wave of his pipe Val Cheyne coming out of the side door which led by a flight of steps into the small garden. "See if they don't land him in starvation in a garret.""I don't believe it," 'Sally' had enough faith for others to reply, "not if they are honest opinions with which vanity and wrong-headedness have nothing to do."'How can one tell whether he is a pure Trojan or whether he is influenced by vanity and wrong-headedness after all?' suggested Dick, helplessly."Why, if he hold the opinions, simply because he cannot help it, because they are the root of the matter to him, when one would sacrifice anything—life itself—and sacrifice it worthily, for such inspiration. It is only when opinions—convictions, rather—are spurious, second-hand fancies, that they are bound to die as the others are bound to live and bear fruit which will survive, perhaps, after the tree which bore it has long lain in the dust."Val came up with his quiet, somewhat abstracted, smile on the dark thin face which contrasted with Dick's fair, florid version of Sarah's face. Val brought a letter in his hand for Sarah. He had taken it from the postman and delivered it to its owner with genuine satisfaction in serving her, though he was ignorant of the contents of the letter, whether they were good or bad."Hallo, Val,"cried Dick, "how goes the line of beauty? Is the British Philistine becoming more appreciative? Is he learn-ing to prefer the grand to the pretty? the severely true to the ornately false? a heroic tragedy to a comic song?"Val shook hands with a patient laugh. "Not he. I suppose he is not educated up to the grand and the true, the heroic and the tragic; or they are not presented to him with such fidelity and living power as to take him by storm and bear him away incontinently into higher regions.""Where he would speedily perish from his foreign environment, the lack of any food which he could assimilate, gasping out his last breath in air far too rarefied for his organs," asserted Dick with a grimace."No, he would not," insisted Val, with his brown eyes beginning to shine with inward light. "He would be just a little bigger in art, possibly in morals, for it is a devil's lie that art has no moral. All art, which is immortal like its creator, holds the highest moral. But if the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, if the poor artist, who is no more than a learner himself, falters and bungles, what can you expect?" and he threw up his hands with an expressive gesture of half mirthful despair."But, my dear chappie," urged Dick, "he is not to be a martyr in consequence. He is to stoop to his subjects, to his patrons, whichever you like to call them—stoop to conquer. He is to comply with their requirements and humour their tastes.""Never!" forbade Val, energetically. "He is to be true to the light which is in him—so far as it goes—else he is a little worth impostor. He deserves nothing better than to be sentenced to paint the pot-boilers, which he and the like of him have originated, for the rest of his days!"You are a conceited martyr, Val," pronounced Dick."No, don't misunderstand me, there is nothing honest which is common or unclean. He may descend to a drawing-master's pencil - strokes or to the most primitive modelling and colouring. So long as he works according to God's laws in his soul and eye and hand he makes his work divine, as George Herbert wrote. But the moment he is dishonest or irreverent, he and his work are done for."'' You are an incorrigibly high-minded beggar," said Dick, with lazy admiration.In the meantime, Sarah had been reading her letter. Suddenly she broke off with a vehement exclamation. "I don't deserve it. You two can bear me witness. I have been fretting and worrying and making everybody miserable for the past week or two. Now, haven't I, mother?" appealing to Mrs Lyster as she joined the others.Mrs Lyster was a stout little woman with a placid air of sober, disciplined motherliness. She roused herself to respond to Sarah's appeal. "What is it that you have been doing, my dear, which you wish me to bear witness to? Oh! worrying. That is just where the old who are possessed of some experience have an advantage over the young. They have ceased, or they ought to have ceased, to worry. They know it is no good. They do their best and trust that things will come right, though, possibly, not quite in the way the doers wished and intended.""Bravo! mother," shouted Dick."You boys and girls," returned Mrs Lyster, "work yourselves into fevers anticipating mischief which you cannot prevent. I am not sure that you are not worse in this respect than the boys and girls of my day—not that Dick here troubles much, and you, Val, seem always to have a great faith. May-be after all it is not the boys so much as the girls like Sarah there who torment themselves because they have not taken a first class at an institute and other trifles of the kind. You will count them trifles when you come to my age, Sally.">"I do it already, mother, for I have received a rebuke for my fearfulness and lack of trust which I think I never can forget. Listen all of you. I am offered the appointment of managing head to the Joint-Stock Good Dress Association and Mantua and Millinery Stores.""I wish you—or shall it be them?—joy," said Dick, with great politeness."The Association," resumed Sarah, "has been recently established under the highest patronage, with every prospect of success. I have heard Miss Barret and Mr Ferrie mention it with great satisfaction. It—the Association—hopes soon to have branch associations in every town of any size in the Kingdom, or, better still, to convert and enlist the best businesses already established, to be carried on as far as may be on sensible and artistic principles.""Who is to pay the piper?" inquired Dick, suspiciously."The capital subscribed is already large enough to enable the Association to hire excellent premises and to give their servants liberal pay," Sarah assured him. "Mother, the members guarantee me, in addition to the prestige and influence of a position far beyond anything I could have expected for years to come, three hundred a year! That is an addition to your little income, mother, which will put you at once far beyond painful pinching and wearing anxiety.""Well done, our Sallikin," cried Dick, beginning to be carried off his feet in his turn."I shall not make a great fortune," said Sarah modestly, " like some of our dressmakers with their affectation of foreign names, their unscrupulous fashions, shady practices and extortionate bills, but you and I and mother will have all the comforts, real refinements and beauties of life.""What next?" asked Dick."Well, something that is still better as, I am sure, both of you will feel; it is the very place I have longed and prayed for, where I may do some good in my generation by carrying out in dress the principles of truthfulness, fitness and thoroughness, which I learnt to my lasting gain at Chesnut Green.""Hurrah! Sal, you are in clover at last," cried Dick, with unstinted, affectionate satisfaction. "Only don't be too elevated and elated for us poor scrimmagers in the ranks of art to live with.""There is no call for elation," protested Sarah, with tears in her eyes. "How many people much better than I have to suffer the disappointment of their hopes, while I who have been ungrateful and discontented on a little provocation have had the desire of my heart gratified! I have not deserved it.""Don't say you have not deserved it, child," her mother objected emphatically. "Dick and I can tell whether you've deserved it or not. You are going to the opposite extreme now. This is the lawful reward of your good sense and diligence which you may take and be thankful. At the same time, Sally, we won't deny that you have been rather difficult to live with for the last week or two.""I congratulate you with all my heart, Miss Lyster," said Val Cheyne, warmly, while he secretly exulted that it was his hand which had brought her the good news."But you must do more than congratulate me—you and Dick," said Sarah, brightly. "Won't you two boys—forgive me, you are not Royal Academicians yet—help me in the best way you can?""How?" demanded both."In the first place, mother and I must move into town, to some quiet street within an easy distance of the Association rooms. That will not be a great strain on your friendship, for you will be nearer class-rooms, studios, picture-dealers and models.""Glorious!" cried Dick, and he was so far left to himself as to turn a somersault on the grass in sight of the neighbours' windows."Dick and I," explained Sarah, "have talked over the move, but have not dared to contemplate it seriously before. We wished to make it while we were still young enough to enjoy it. To be sure, mother is beyond the age for enjoying removals, into town specially, but we'll spare her all we can, and you'll be content to go with us, your children, to the ends of the earth—won't you, mother?""Cheerfully, my dear, cheerfully," and there was no mistaking Mrs Lyster's willingness."And now, here is what you—Dick and Val—forgive me again, Mr Val," Sarah checked herself, blushing rosily, "we have known each other a long time—what you are to do in particular for me. The note says I may choose my artists—if my artists will respond to my choice.""I'll answer for the beggars," vowed Dick."It stands to reason that we shall lacerate the feelings of our customers to begin with," continued Sarah. "We must decline to let them wear costumes which will not hold water in any sense—sanitary, anatomical, or really beautiful.""We'll coerce them for their good, Sarah—the Association started for good dressmaking," Dick reminded his hearers."We must beg the old to pay their crown of glory—their hoary heads—the mark of respect contained in sheltering and shading them.""Do you hear that, mother? You'll have to furnish the example.""We must ask the young not to freeze with cold the one moment, by exposing their bare arms and the region of their wind-pipes to east wind and fog, and to collapse with heat the next by having to struggle along in sealskin jackets and toques with the wind in the south and the leaves beginning to bud.""Of course not," Val ventured to strike in."We must offer the sufferers compensations. Our lines are not to be those of flower-pots, or of wasps, or of puffed-up, bulging-out, leg-of-mutton sleeves, or of uncanonical bishop sleeves, or of yards and yards of unnecessary cloth trailing at the wearer's heels, in bell skirts and umbrella, skirts pulling her down, even when they are not carrying the dirt of the streets in their folds.""What are we coming to?" besought Dick."Our lines must be exquisitely true as well as free and flowing. Our combinations of colours must be ravishingly perfect and of an infinite variety like those of nature. The designs of our patterns must satisfy the eye and fill and rest the imagination like those of the highest achievements in tapestry. They must be such as to defy the criticism of the most accomplished artist. Will you condescend to work for me, Dick? Will you help me, Mr Val, in the selection of delicious colours and the contriving of faultless designs?""Done!" cried both the young men in one breath.Then Val delivered the dictum. "There is no condescension in contributing to the proper draping of God's great work, the human body, so long as it is not left to idle, whimsical, fantastic women, eaten up with personal vanity—forgive me, Miss Lyster, for finding fault with the most frivolous of your sex—who seek to procure notoriety at any cost.""Or to ignorant, rapacious tradespeople who boom certain articles—often the most senseless and hideous—in the hope of making gigantic profits by them," put in Dick. "Give all these people a wide berth; have nothing to do with them.""You are right," agreed Val. "For there is not only condescension, there is degrada-tion in their service. But rightly viewed and treated, the work is one to which no man need hesitate to put his hand."The Lysters removed accordingly to the great city proper. But though they were in proximity to the centre of traffic, Mrs Lyster and Sarah managed to make between them, with their increased means, and with hearts hopeful and at rest, one of the pleasantest homes to which eager young aspirants after fame and fortune like Dick and Val Cheyne came thankfully for refreshment and sympathy.The two young men served Sarah loyally with their artists' education and virile taste to balance and complete her Chesnut Green mastery of technique, and her feminine delicacy of perception.Sarah insisted that her aides should be paid the customary fees for their work. These made a welcome addition to their slender purses—so much so that Val, the poorer of the two, was able to afford sundry desirable additions to his wardrobe and to his studio, as well as to run over to Paris and Germany to see what high art was doing in French and German studios.In time, Dick grew restive. He con-sidered he was wasting his days in being drawn away from landscape, which was his real bent, to figure subjects and studies of draperies and decorations for which he was convinced he had no natural faculty.He believed that he would more effectually benefit his art and his people—now that Sarah could provide amply for herself and her mother—by taking himself off to the depths of the country, not only in England, but in more distant wilds. He would live by his wits, and his pencils and brushes—it was high time he did.He carried his purpose into execution, and proved that he was right in his conclusions, though he had to endure roughing, and to face many hardships before he was Dick Lyster, the well-known, successful landscape painter.In the meantime, Mrs Lyster and Sarah would have felt forlorn if there had not been Val Cheyne to help to fill the absent son and brother's place.Strange to say, Val never found what Dick called "Val's heroics" in danger of being spoilt by his designs for printed calico, flowered silk or embossed velvet, or by his schemes of colour in gowns, mantles and hats, his greys and russets, soft browns and greens, subdued sunset-orange and purple for the ripe autumn of life, or his primrose, apple-blossom, and summer-sky tints for its sweet spring-time.He said it was a relief to him to turn to such quiet domestic interests. While he was doing so, he could think more vigorously and vividly than at any other time of warrior and knight-errant, scholar and reformer encountering terrible odds in the cause of truth, justice and mercy, or of martyred maidens meekly accepting torture while they soared into regions as far above it as the stainless heavens are above the soiled earth with its mortal care and pain.At last, Val Cheyne painted such a picture of the victory of faith, and of divine love and light over doubt and wrath and darkness, that the world cried out and crowded to see it. It was hung on the line in the Academy. Sarah and Mrs Lyster were as proud of it as if the successful painter had been Dick.Val was not triumphant, he was humble and beseeching in his agitation. "It will be Dick's turn next," he said, almost apologising for taking the precedence."In the meantime, let this be the work of your son, Mrs Lyster, but not of another brother of Sarah's, of her accepted husband."Sarah turned where her face was hidden. Mrs Lyster shook his hand and quitted the pair."Dearest Sarah," he protested, "I could not have accomplished even this small instalment of what I hope to do if you had not taught me more of true art than I could ever have learnt for myself. You showed me how lofty and pure its aspirations ought to be, even in their simplest application, when art becomes universal.""No, no," she denied. "It was all in yourself.""You did me good in other ways than in pointing out how to fill my empty purse without corresponding loss, so that I could afford to be myself. I could spare time to overcome my defects and hindrances. Sarah, will you have me for your husband and let me keep for my own your example and sympathy? Believe me, dear, I have loved you long with a love which cannot fail, and I will do my best to be a good son to your mother, and a good brother to my old friend Dick.""Val," whispered Sarah, "you have made me twice over a proud and happy woman, for I love you as you love me—only you can never know what it is to have a genius whom the whole world will recognise one day for your wife, as I shall have for my husband.""There are many kinds of geniuses," he told her, "and I want no other wife than the one I have won."Thus there was a very pretty, bright wedding. Charlotte Kirby brought the flowers, and there never before were such lovely flowers so charmingly arranged.Delia Wentworth made the wedding-cake, and it was the queen of wedding cakes.Ella Mainwaring set to fresh music and sang gleefully her idiotically inappropriate doggerel:— "Where is the maiden in practice weakWhose feats of work are hard to seek,Who will melt the ice in her teacher's veinsTill generous manhood grips the reins?Where is the man who knows how to laze,The dandy, the masher of former days,Who will bravely woo a strong-minded mate,And dare her to shirk the common fate?Minnie Rae came up to town for the occasion. She committed her little boy to safe keeping and faced the bitter-sweet memories of a wedding in order to stay with Mrs Lyster during the honeymoon trip of the bride and bridegroom. And there never was an old lady so waited on and cared for and entertained in the absence of her family as was Mrs Lyster.The result of it all was that the managing head of the Women's Good Dress Association was no longer a hard-worked, liable-to-be-fagged and harassed girl, but a hard-working matron secure in the support of a devoted husband who was fast becoming a distinguished painter.CHAPTER XVI DELIA WENTWORTH'S TWO BOOKSALL the nice girls who had been at Chesnut Green, and it seems as if a large proportion of the girls had been nice, took a lively interest in the future careers and achievements of those who had been fellow-apprentices with them in the various guilds of the Institute.There was much excitement and exultation among the "old girls," as they called themselves, when Delia Wentworth scored a tremendous success.It had always been expected from Delia, though she had failed in taking a first class. Yet, here was she actually securing of what might be reckoned a double first in two far apart spheres.To begin with, Delia's people were richer than ever, even as wealth attracts wealth. A millionaire relation had died and left the family in general, and Delia in particular, a large part of his riches.The news had drifted down to Chesnut Green and to the dispersed circle of workers who were Delia's contemporaries. A sorrowful impression crossed their minds that now, perhaps, when she was more and more independent and full of means, she might be tempted to desert the great army of working - women and to employ her energies in other enterprises—in a new exploration society to dig up the vanished cities of Greece or an expedition to decipher the hieroglyphics on Assyrian tombs, or an alliance to work fresh gold and diamond mines in Africa.But no, the sole alteration wrought in Delia's plans and performances by her accession to a private fortune, and consequent increase of personal power and responsibility, was that she felt warranted in indulging in two speculations with regard to which there was a certain risk. The one referred to her life work and the other to her cherished recreation.Delia felt she might now accomplish two flights of the nature, respectively, of a woman's serious purpose and a robust child's gay gambol. She published two books at her own expense. One was of a moderate size and the other was only a small pamphlet. But, as everybody knows, to publish books, big or little, without a popular name, to pay out of a man or a woman's own pocket the papermaker, the printer, the bookbinder, the advertiser, etc., etc., is to open a very flood-gate of expenses which few authors care to encounter. Delia launched out on two widely-removed currents. She wrote a cookery-book in a couple of parts, which could be bought separately, the one at a marvellously low price.The first part was addressed with great skill and sedulous care to the poor of various classes and conditions—the inhabitants of crowded tenements, of small jerry-built houses, of homely cottages.The second part foraged for the rich in their daintiest dishes and most toothsome entrées, which should yet be perfectly wholesome, innocent of evil in seasoning, not guilty of an undue, insane hunt after forced, tortured, out-of-season luxuries, not provocative of criminally inordinate cost.The other work, the theory in the region of the higher mathematics, was a mere pleasant play of the mental athletics, bred of Cambridge lore, with which Delia had solaced herself in the drudgery of mastering her calling.Both books made their way with remarkable rapidity. Each was acknowledged by its public to be a masterpiece of its kind. No cookery-book had been given to the world before, which was at once so sane and so subtle, so practical and so finished, with such a grasp on first principles, and such an artist's touch in the last details.The theory of the Calculus was simple in the sense of clear profundity and the unerringly soaring instincts of mathematical genius.The marvel of two such books coming from the same source, and that a woman young and fair and well endowed with this world's goods, converted the vivid impression which each had produced into a strong sensation. Delia awoke one day to find herself famous, to shake her head, protest the world had little to wonder at, and go her way regardless of her renown.But Delia's friends at Chesnut Green and elsewhere paid more heed to her laurels. These friends cried that they had always known what was in Delia Went-worth. They hugged the feats she had performed, and the acclamations bestowed on the feats, as if feats and acclamations were the common property and the individual gain of each member, former or present, of the Institute.Down at Chesnut Green, naturally, the rejoicing was most rampant, and nearly carried not only Miss Barret but Mr Sam Ferrie also off his feet.He was with difficulty prevented from founding a "Delia Wentworth" scholarship in cookery. He had sufficient influence with the Council to pull it through. The obstacle was a peremptory refusal on Delia's side to lend her name to what she thought proper to term a misappropriation of the funds of the Institute."I will lay aside a sum of money to help any young cook in the kingdom to come up and serve her time at the Institute. I will make it a perpetual endowment if the heads of the Institute wish it," Delia pledged herself; "but since there is no 'Barret Scholarship,' and no 'Ferrie Scholarship,' there shall be no 'Delia Wentworth Scholarship.'"CHAPTER XVIITHE CALAMITY WHICH BEFELL MR. SAM FERRIESO-CALLED misfortunes are not far to seek in any age. Commercial disasters are as plentiful as blackberries in this generation. There are great swindling collapses of specious "companies," in which thousands of people—generally the most helpless—have been entrapped.There is the gradual—almost inconceivable—decline of trading concerns, once so flourishing that the public faith in them has survived their stability, until one fine morning, amazed and indignant, creditors find themselves penniless.There are wild, mad speculations, laying hold, like a diabolic possession, of the heads of great mercantile houses and the representatives of ancient, aristocratic families, not content, as their fathers were, with solid but not limitless prosperity, engaging in tremendous risks for boundless profits, with widespread devastation and ruin in their track.Never was the warning, "Trust not in riches," more called for where men are concerned; never was the fancy that riches make to themselves wings and flee away exemplified on a grander scale.These are the wise parents and children who enhance (instead of detracting from) the material satisfaction in easy circumstances, by anticipating the possible advent of a season when conditions may be anything rather than easy. Parents and children arm themselves beforehand with weapons of trades and professions of which the bearers have the mastery. They can fight poverty, guard their own heads, and come with peace and honour out of the contest with storm and tumult.It was not, therefore, a strange surprise, though it was a shock which filled all interested in it with regret and consternation, when it became known that a British and foreign bank, hitherto held as incapable of insolvency as was the Bank of England, had stopped payment, with affairs grievously though not fraudulently involved, and with Mr Sam Ferrie for one of the shareholders.The bank was so big a bank, with such far-reaching interests and valuable assets, that there was little doubt it would right itself in time, but it could hardly be in much less a period than half a century. In the meanwhile, the shareholders who had no other source of income than the dividends from their shares found themselves destitute; while those who had more than one string to their bow saw themselves bound to provide their proportion of the vast liabilities of the bank.The day after the bank's failure Mr Ferrie resigned his presidency and chairmanship of the Managing Committee of the Chesnut Green Institute. The prompt step caused even more dismay than the announcement that he was one of the hapless shareholders in the bank. It was the realisation of the consequences of the calamity.The heads of the colony at Chesnut Green wrung their hands. Every former member of the Institute, worthy of their training, in their dispersion carrying out the principles of their college, bemoaned the deadly blow to its growing importance and usefulness.Chesnut Green without Mr Sam! It was impossible to conceive it. A deputation of the Committee and the Council waited upon him, and besought him to reconsider his resolution. It was understood they made him liberal offers of supplying the defalcation in the funds which would be caused by the cessation of his large contributions to the income of the Institute. They proposed to vote the allowance of an ample salary for what had previously been honorary offices.A deputation from the proprietors of the various boarding and lodging-houses and from the villagers implored him not to endanger the fortunes of which he had been largely the founder.A deputation of girl apprentices grew at once forgetful of his brusqueness and bluntness, his wrathful tirades and cutting sarcasms directed against their ignorance of their own minds, their idleness or their spasmodic, undisciplined industry. They were smitten with remorse for their resistance and with grief for his misfortunes, remembering only that they were losing their best friend and chief benefactor, were ready to go down on their knees at his feet if by so doing they could induce him to retract his words.He was obdurate. He maintained that without means and with the burden of the bank's responsibilities oppressing and harassing him he would only be a drag upon the Institute; he could no longer look after its interests as they should be looked after.He declined to "saddle" the enterprise with a paid official when there were many members of the Committee with sufficient leisure to do the job out of sheer regard for women's welfare. If they did not undertake the service from public spirit and goodwill, "for love," as the saying went, they would certainly not accomplish it to any purpose "for money."He was even a little rough and rude, though it was to himself and not to them, when he added that if he had minded the business of the bank—in which he ought not to have remained a passive partner—as he had minded the business of the Institute, he might not indeed have prevented the calamity, for it was of a magnitude with which no single man could be expected to cope, but he might have protested against some of the reckless proceedings, and he might have helped to stave off the crisis till the bank could realise more of its resources, and so have lessened the crushing weight of the blow.Matters were in this state when a young, energetic woman arrived late one evening at the Chesnut Green railway station. It was clear enough that she had been accustomed to be waited upon; it was equally clear that she could wait upon herself when there was any necessity for it.She wore her youth, fine looks and gentle breeding easily and gracefully as accidents which would naturally please the world at large, and possibly serve as a passport to its favour when the world happened to be a strange world. These accidents never overwhelmed her with their claims and obligations like the proverbial white elephant. They could not expose her to any number of humiliating restrictions and cowardly refuges in order to save her from inconveniences and annoyances—conventional when they were not fictitious.This girl, though she was fair to see, was not so dazzlingly, blindingly fair as to tempt every man, high and low, to forget his manhood and her womanhood for the purpose of teasing her with unwelcome attentions and unwarranted intrusions. Her unaffected dignity would not so much as permit her to apprehend impertinence, far less insult.She was not glass that she should break, or sugar that she should melt. Her judgment was wide awake and so was her common sense, together with her largeminded, cheerful courage and charity—the reverse of pessimistic recklessness. She was mistress of many situations.She could not possibly, from the distance she had travelled, reach Chesnut Green before nightfall. She was not accustomed to take long journeys alone, but she had no fear of doing what hundreds and thousands of self-respecting working-women do continually with impunity. She would have despised herself if she could have believed that she required a special shield.On the contrary, her impression was that everybody, from the railway porters to the cabmen, were remarkably civil and kind to her—of which the explanation might be that she herself was a particularly civil as well as bright and handsome young woman.The traveller drove straight to St Catherine's, and asked a servant, who knew and welcomed her gladly, to tell Miss Barret the name of the late arrival.Miss Barret came at once to the drawing-room. She looked pale and worried, and immediately flung herself into the traveller's arms. "Delia, Delia, you know and you are here to help us, I am sure," and Miss Barret looked wonderfully relieved."Come with me to Mr Sam Ferrie," Delia Wentworth asked directly."What! at this hour?" exclaimed Miss Barret. But she complied with the request instantly, not even waiting to get her bonnet and mantle before she went to the cab still standing at the door.It was Delia who noticed the omission, and cried, "You will catch your death of cold, Miss Barret. We shall begin by making him furious because of my uncalled-for haste and lack of consideration."She proceeded, in spite of Miss Barret's remonstrances, to smother and extinguish that lady's cap in the traveller's fleeciest wrap. "Now I have made a guy of you," she remarked calmly as she finished the operation; "but never mind, he won't care if he thinks you are comfortable.""But I am not comfortable," urged Miss Barret. "I am half choked, and a cap which I only bought last night will be wholly ruined.""In a good cause," Delia told her; "and you and I can run up to town to Sarah Cheyne and buy half a dozen other caps to-morrow, if you like."The old manor-house of Chesnut Green had always been the most neglected, nearest to forlorn, place in the colony. It looked more than usually dreary this night with everything in disorder and Mr Sam Ferrie's luggage standing ready packed in the hall. For, in his horror of a final demonstration, he had meant to get off" early next morning without letting anybody know or saying good-bye to a single soul."Miss Barret! Miss Wentworth! Where have you sprung from? To what do I owe the honour of this late visit?" He rose somewhat stiffly from his chair at his office table covered with the closed books and filed papers of the Institute.The fire was low for a chill evening in late October. The hearth had not been attended to in the bustle of coming departure. The very gas seemed to burn with a doleful flicker. Sam Ferrie looked a worn, gruff man, long past his first youth, past even the pet projects and generous hopes of his beneficent prime. Yet there was one person there who thought that he had never looked a truer, braver man, or a nobler gentleman, than in the day of his defeat.As his eyes rested on Delia, he forgot his own downfall in his satisfaction at being able to congratulate her personally on what she had done."You are a credit to us, Miss Wentworth," he said warmly. "I am glad that my term of office—shall I say?—has lasted long enough for me to see the Institute well repaid for its labours by a worthy pupil, who has fully illustrated its whole meaning and intent."She blushed brightly, but hastened to say, "I have not come to speak about my books, except to say that if they have given you any pleasure, I am glad, and that if there is any good in them they are indebted for it to the Institute and Girton."I have come to speak about you yourself, Mr Ferrie,"Delia went on, courageously. "I have pressed Miss Barret, who is here trembling in her shoes, as you may see, into the service. Do you remember how you used to dictate to us—I am afraid I must say domineer over us?"—with a flash of fun in her eyes. "It is our turn now."He bent his brows into a frown, but he was forced to laugh, which was what she wanted."Why are you retiring from the management of the Institute?" she suddenly assailed him. "You have made it what it is—I confidently believe, a great power for good, yet you are abandoning it on the first provocation! That is not like you, that is not what we have been taught to look for from you.""I hope I taught, or tried to teach, you to do your duty," he said shortly."Duty!" she exclaimed scornfully. "Here, you are the right man in the right place; can you answer to your conscience for vacating the place, and abandoning the cause of us women—us inconsequent, unqualified women—called on to work without business training? They say you say it is for various excellent reasons.""I should cease to be of use," he protested."That is, you have no longer money to contribute to the funds of the Institute. You will not consent to be its paid servant while it is still a comparatively young institution, though you have made its youth to flourish exceedingly. You have other business, which you have hitherto neglected to your own loss and to the loss of a multitude of sufferers. To that business you are henceforth to devote your energies.""So I propose," acquiesced Sam Ferric, doggedly, while he played with a paperknife and avoided looking at the eager speaker.She had taken off her hat that she might be free from its pressure and push the clustering hair back from her heated forehead. She sat there radiant in her twenty-six years, her passionate earnestness, her endless possibilities."In the first place," she resumed, "the money you were accustomed to furnish will be supplied, either in your name or in that of another person. What does it signify if it is made sure, as it will be, to the Institute?"He looked up quickly, and then looked down again."In the second place, we will let you work for nothing if you will consent to permit us to house and feed you—a small concession on your part."He laughed grimly."In the third place, it is too late for you to attempt to deliver a submerged bank of huge magnitude. An Atlas could not do it. If you could at any time have accomplished something to speak of, in the way of bolstering up the unwieldy concern, which I crave leave to doubt, the time is past.""My duty is not past," he reminded her wearily, and she told him plainly,—"What you mean to do now and for the rest of your life a respectable chartered accountant would in all probability do infinitely better. Your vocation is not banking, or going over, to satiated disgust, bank loans and trusts.""Every man can compel a vocation if he sets his mind to it," he insisted."That was not quite your old opinion," she answered reproachfully. "You would have said that would involve an irreparable loss of time and material, always supposing there was a natural vocation to be rooted out, and an acquired vocation substituted for it."He spoke more seriously, with considerable indignation, when he referred to her and her interference with his views and plans."Where is the money to come from which is to be poured gratuitously into the vacuum occasioned by my losses? If it is yours that you are dealing with thus unceremoniously, Miss Wentworth, I know you are of age, but your friends ought to have some voice in your making ducks and drakes of your fortune. What do they say to this lavish liberality on your part? Your father—"He stopped short with the remembrance that her father—a keen man of business—was recently dead. The fear that he might have hurt her arrested his bullying, and converted the rest of his sentence into what contained little more than gentle rallying."Come, you don't mean to say that you are supported by your brothers and your man of business in the wild generosity of, as I understand it, sinking a large part of your fortune in this Institute? Even your mother and sisters would object—though they are women—and we know what that comes to, when sentiment is allowed to encroach on business, in spite of the New Woman, or the Hard Woman, or any other preposterous, eccentric development of the sex.""I am more than of age, and I am my own mistress," she said proudly. "I am defrauding nobody. All the other members of my family have enough and to spare. I feel that the responsibility rests with me, and my friends share the feeling. I can do what I will with my own. We are not at strife; we are in touch, though naturally we don't all think alike.""I should think not," he commented sardonically."I have made no secret of my intentions with regard to you and the Institute," she went on seriously, "yet my brother, the busy barrister, and now the engrossed member for Wandsbury, found a few spare minutes to meet me when I reached London, and see me to the station.""He should have come further," he said significantly."As for my mother, she was only chagrined that a long-standing engagement to take two of my sisters to pay a visit to a friend's country house prevented her from accompanying me to Chesnut Green and St Catherine's. You see," she finished with a little joyous laugh, in which her white teeth flashed out between her red lips, "I have not been able to cure her entirely of her prejudice against a healthy young woman's travelling alone, or paying a visit even to dear old St Catherine's unattended by a chaperon."A bright idea had struck Sam Ferrie while she spoke, and he was leaning forward in his chair looking his former, ardent, imperious self. "The very thing!" he cried, "I have it. If you will invest your money in the Institute which, after all, is, I believe, safer commercially than can be said of scores of enterprises, while it will also give you a return for your capital such as cannot be found in any bank book, take my place."She stared at him in silence."You are fit for it; you are made for it. What more proper suggestion than that a woman should preside over the Institute in the interests of women? That a woman it has bred, who has already earned distinction in her own person, should conduct it to a splendidly successful issue in the future?""Never!" refused Delia, growing suddenly pale with pain and anger. "What! turn you out! fill your place! what do you take me for, Mr Sam Ferrie?""You are not turning me out," he met her with an incontrovertible argument. "I am resigning my post of my own free will, and how can you be filling my place when it is no longer mine to fill? when it is left vacant for—in all likelihood, if you refuse it—a far less efficient president?"She turned away, hurt and impatient. "Oh! you are cruel," she said impulsively, "good men can be so cruel. You will not understand. Come along, Miss Barret," and she rose from her chair.But Miss Barret lingered, looking from the one to the other with wistful, imploring eyes. Were they drifting apart, plunging deeper into cross purposes, missing their opportunity once and for ever?"For the sake of the Institute," he blundered on; "you could do so much for it. Think of it, Delia Wentworth, think of the honour and glory of being, by precept and example, the benefactress of the women of your generation.""I do not care for honour and glory," was wrung from Delia, while there was a curious break like a despairing sob in her voice. "The Institute will stand without my support, though I wish to do my duty by it as by all else. You taught us to do our duty in the smallest detail of our work, yet you are cruel, yes, cruel and inconsistent. You will not let me give my means to benefit one proud, ungrateful man, while, by way of compensation, you mock me with the assurance that I may become the benefactress of the women of my generation! Come along instantly, Miss Barret, we have stayed too long here."They had only stayed long enough to open a modest man's eyes and cause him to stride forward, clasp Delia's half reluctant hands, gaze into her bashfully averted eyes, and cry out, while Miss Barret averted her gaze, and rudely turned her back as a prelude to walking to the door."Is it so, Delia? Can it really be so? A middle-aged duffer, a small tyrant who has made such a mess of his private affairs that he has not at this moment five pounds which he can honestly call his own. Am I not taking a gross advantage of your youth, your great kindness and generosity, my dear? Do you mean it? Can you really mean it? Do not keep me in suspense.""Yes," she found voice to say with deliberate determination. "I mean it and a great deal more. I have thought all the years I was at Chesnut Green—at least after the first two or three months—that there was not another man like you in the whole wide world, and I cannot get it out of my head, though it is very conceited of me, no doubt, that you thought just the least little bit of me, too, sir, and that was the reason why you were so mad with me when Sarah Lyster and I lost our first classes. But it would never have done for you to have stooped in that way to one of the young women of the Institute. It would have been worse than poor Mr Rae's losing his heart to 'pretty Miss Millar' while she was a girl in his class."He had no words with which to answer her, so she continued to rally him."Delia! Delia! what nonsense you are talking," he remonstrated. For all answer she told him,—"It is altogether different now that I have left, though I don't know that it would have mattered much under present circumstances. You see everything would have been forgiven to you, and to me in your reflected light. As it is, I hope nobody will mind my coming expressly from Cornwall to London, and then down here, and taking you by storm."Thus Mr Sam Ferrie did not retire from the Institute, and it gained rather than lost by the misfortunes of the great bank. For he had a faithful partner, a wise adviser and sympathiser in all his cares. If he was the most able of presidents, Delia Ferrie was a no less able vice-president. She made the manor-house the most beautiful and the cheeriest of homes—a home to more than her boys and girls, to every well-disposed and every desolate young member of the Institute.It might have seemed as if the general approval and acclamation with which Sarah Lyster's marriage was hailed could not have been exceeded, if it had not been for the resounding plaudits which followed the announcement of an alliance between the President and the ablest of his former pupils. For it was the head and front of the undertaking who was thus preserved to it, and it was Delia Wentworth, illustrious in combined cookery and mathematics, who had come to the rescue. She had won the eternal gratitude of the colony by expressing in her single person the loyalty surging in the hearts of the "Many Daughters," who had not been endowed with the power to give it utterance. Ella Mainwaring, however, was not behind in celebrating the great event of the marriage of Sam Ferrie and Delia Wentworth. When all the little world of Chesnut Green was given over to blatant rejoicing in the shape of flags and fireworks, Ella brought to light again and sang with much brilliance and character-istic glee, those inappropriate verses of hers, in which the lines were disgracefully halting, and the inference scandalously incorrect. THE END Colston & Coy. Limited, Printers, Edinburgh Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters" Advert included in back of Tyter's "Many Daughters"