elty of the sensation. "The land will soon be about the only thing we have left. Why not try that?

He was silent. It was a good shot. His trust was actually meditating the greatest venture of all-the purchase of a huge tract of land in England for the experiment of farming under modern conditions and on the grand scale. Farming as an industry was their watchword, not as the mere labor test of a pauper caste. And, for their principle, they held that not the English land, but only the English land system, had broken down. Fields laid out, plowed, sown, and reaped by the square mile, with good wages for good workers, each man straining to do his best under the inducements of hope; the farm-house a laboratory; the farm-hands chemist's assistants; the barn an engineer's shop; the hall abolished as only a more glittering poorhouse; the best tools, the best brains, the best men everywhere; the market-place a real exchange, with the railways brought into line, by purchase, too, if need be, as parts of the wondrous plan. And, for the glorious outcome, England fed without protection from her own fields, and the surplus exported at a profit to the United States.

Uncle Sam as the 'squoire,'" she continued-" tail-coat, straps, and all. A second conquest of England."

"Why conquer when you can buy ?" "Dear old Allonby! Dear old Liddicot!"

lish people! Training them down to the level of their position, not up to the level of their powers and their rights. Their education, high and low, still a joke for the competing foreigner, and a clerical one at that! The infinite littleness of the whole thing, the poverty of the issues, the inaccessibility to ideas!"

"We are not going to have our country ruled on 'business principles,"" she faltered. Why not, Miss Mary? Business principles are honor, honesty, justice from man to man. What's the matter with them?' "Wooden nutmegs there!" cried Mary, seizing the first missile that came to hand.

"Remounts," he retorted, breaking into a hearty laugh. "The men who managed that business have not much to learn from anybody."

But Mary was not beaten yet. She remembered what she had heard from the squire as to the humbleness of Mr. Gooding's origin. Her pride of birth came to her aid. To think of it-this person with his masterful way with his betters, separated by only two generations from a peasant of one of her father's fields!

"You must not talk to me like that," she said in her grandest manner-the manner which she had caught less by precept than by the mere example of the picture-gallery at Liddicot.

The real sting of the rebuke was entirely lost on the young man. It had never occurred to him that he might not approach her on a footing of perfect social equality. The only degrees he knew of in his dealings with his fellow-creatures were those of sense, energy, and courage-faculty, in a word, with, of course, a due allowance for the voluntary service of homage where women were concerned. Her tone now made him keenly apprehensive that he might have been wanting in the last.

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I am afraid I have failed in respect," he said. "Please forgive me again."

"It is nothing for which you need care to have my forgiveness," said Mary, coldly, quite misunderstanding him still.

"I would not say anything displeasing to you for the world."

'I am afraid you would," said Mary, still with a good deal of heat beneath the surface of ice.

Is not that rather ungenerous?" "It is not meant so, I assure you. You

might sometimes fail to understand, that is all."

"That is it," he said, with the same innocent audacity as before. "One does not take the proper account of ways of thinking, ways of life."

It was an apology to the woman still, not to the squire's daughter.

"We are not exactly your inferiorsplease remember that," she said, by way of putting him on the right track.

"I know little of the others, but I shall always consider myself yours."

She began to think that he had caught her meaning at last, but she was woefully mistaken.

"Do you suppose that I could so long have had the privilege of your companionship without feeling the superiority of your goodness, of your devotion to your father and your brother, the charm of—”

If he saved himself from a still more personal compliment, it was only by a hair's-breadth.

Mary began to understand at last, and she left the society of her ancestors and came back to her own time. The mention of her brother turned the whole current of her thoughts as with a pang of the sense of ingratitude.

"My devotion! Can I ever forget yours -the long journey—"

"An outing."

And in that train of thought came the memory of his supreme service to herself in the affair of the card-table, the one crisis of her simple life. It came with just such a rush of feeling as had kept her silent and abashed in his presence when first she realized the immensity of the obligation. Was it for her to give him lessons, when in all their relations his had ever been the guiding hand and brain, the surer for his lightness of touch and his unconscious avoidance of all vestige of a claim? Beside such appeals, what grossness in any other, and especially in her own of mere social position! She rejoiced that this blunder had escaped him by the accidents of nature and training, and she felt the full force of his homage to her womanhood, and to that alone. She was conquered by his sheer faculty-the only thing, happily, thank God, that wins at last, or where would be the hopes of the race? Here was the strength, in all its finest attributes, for which she had learned

to long, and especially in gentleness and never-failing courtesy. Here, once more,

was a man!

"It is for you to forgive me now," she said. "I am but a girl yet, and you are a school-boy no more."

"No, no," he laughed. "I am not to be dubbed into that dignity at a moment's notice. Let me still fancy we are only boy and girl together, for it has been the greatest happiness of my life. But since you embolden me to plead for favors, little playmate," and he took her hand,promise me that if I come to you when I am really dubbed, and ask you a question, you will try to give me a kind answer.”

She said nothing, but the blood rushed to her face as she met his look with eyes as of molten fire from rising tears.

It was a reply of a sort, and it was so encouraging that, greatly daring, he drew her gently toward him.

And so it came about.

XXXIX

THE Saturday before the coronation, and glorious August weather. London was never brighter- or less severe-flags out, crowds from all parts of the country and, in spite of previous disappointment, from most parts of the earth. Every other conscript in this huge army of pleasure looked as though he carried the marshal's baton in his knapsack-that is to say, as one still hoping for a ticket for Westminster Abbey.

The central point, as the great meetingplace for plebs and aristocracy, was the Marble Arch. All else in London is for one or the other. This is for both. Here rank and wealth and fashion taking the air, yonder their deadly opposites commending them most heartily to the devil, in perpetual public meeting, under the friendly guardianship of the police. No other scene in the world to match this for the hate of hate, the toleration of policy and contempt. The police know what they are about. This assumption that the devil is ever ready to anticipate is one of the most persistent errors of the vulgar. He is a great student of history, and he bides his time. For those who refuse to bide theirs, the site of the busy old gallows of Hogarth's day is close at hand, with its memo

rial stone: "Here stood Tyburn Gate." It is a gentle hint to the disaffected that valor must still be tempered by discretion.

A street preacher, who naturally enjoyed the same liberty as the others, held forth on the late postponement of the ceremony as a judgment on the nation for its slack attendance at church. The ballad-mongers were in full cry, one of them on the subject of imperial emigration. With its burden of "I mye be a millionhair," his song was quite a battle-hymn of the democracy, at need. The cheap jacks bawled their wares - coronation medals, and biographies of the royal pair. The grass was black with recumbent loafers sunning themselves through the long hours between the closing of the casual wards in the morning and their opening at night.

Lord Ogreby and his family occupied a carriage in the drive. That nobleman was at once cheerful and depressed. His house had for generations claimed the right of offering a toothpick to the monarch, after dinner, on coronation day. It was done on bended knee. The right had not been denied on the present occasion by the Lord Chancellor, the Earl Marshal, the Lord Chief Justice, and other members of the Court of Claims; but, as the Lord Chancellor had observed in giving judgment, after counsel had raised many points of antiquarian and feudal lore, the question was, in this instance, beyond the purview of the court. Since there would be no state dinner, there could be no toothpick in active demand as part of the pageant. The right was therefore in abeyance on the present occasion. The applicant submitted, with the sense of duty done: at any rate, he had fought the good fight. "I have my children to think of," he said with spirit, "and one day the banquet may be revived." He was now bearing home a brand-new instrument of this description, ordered perhaps precipitately; and, with its inner and outer casings, it occupied no small part of the roof of his coach.

He had just exchanged bows with a lady driving in the opposite direction and toward the arch. Her fine face wore an air of weariness that heightened the refinement of its beauty. After passing the gate, her carriage turned down the Bayswater Road, and drew up before a small turfed inclosure a few hundred yards on the

right-hand side. It was dismissed there, with orders to call again in an hour.

The person who alighted was Augusta, Duchess of Allonby, in town with the rest for the coming ceremony. The place was her favorite retreat for meditation, and it had been provided by the munificence of an estimable woman, now dead. It was a small chapel, or a large monastic cell, just as you chose to take it, but a chapel without a service or other hindrance to pure spiritual contemplation. Outside, the great roaring thoroughfare; within, the peace of the desert, a house of reverie.

Thus spoke an inscription on its gate:

Passengers through the busy streets of London, enter this sanctuary for rest and silence and prayer.

And again:

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Come and rest awhile. Commune with your own hearts, and be still.

The duchess did not immediately enter the chapel. Nodding to the solitary attendant at the door, she passed through a passage to a large garden at the back, well hidden from the road. It was quite in the note, being a garden of the cozy dead. For years they had been disturbed by no newcomer of their own recumbent order. They must have relished their exclusiveness: they were the dead of St. George's, Hanover Square. Posterity had not been unmindful of their comfort. Their gravestones had been removed from the original sites, as though to lighten the indispensable labors of the last day; and all was now in readiness for either the trump of the archangel or the pick of the speculative builder. One monument showed that poor Laurence Sterne had here found a bed, after the weariness of his closing pilgrimage. It was but a bed for the night. The flowery inscription, however, said nothing about the bodysnatchers who, in due course of business, had stolen him away. Not for that mercurial spirit even the rest of the grave!

Augusta took a turn round the cemetery, and then entered the chapel. At first she had it all to herself, for London sets small store by this particular bounty of the pious founder. At a later stage she was joined, on tiptoe, by a gray-headed

senior, with one hand in a sling and the other at his brow-like herself, apparently, a refugee from the too insistent event of the day. He had evidently come to think things out on his own account, and he was quite unmindful of her presence.

She would have preferred to be alone. It is amazing how few opportunities of this sort any of us enjoy. There is ever some one by, within intrusive hearing or scarcely less intrusive sight. The partnership of bed and board with humanity is sometimes too rigorous. We have to be gathered together even for prayer. We live in crowds, think in crowds, and rarely have the happiness to stand with no fellow creature beyond the range of suggestion. Even in this instance, it was still possible to spy other strangers of a kind on the pictured wall. Its fine sacred art told of things done long ago; yet these might still have been kept more in the key of repose. The too thunderous and tumultuous fellowship of the prophets, with their deeds of judgment, the excessively strenuous, though glorious, company of the apostles, with their energy of ministration, seemed superfluous in such a connection. The Founder in the wilderness, another founder under the tree, an apostle of quietism in his cell, would have been enough for that contemplation, "without form, likeness, manner, or figure," which is the all in all.

So Augusta just shut her eyes and began a meditation. She was sick at heart. Her grief for the death of Rose, long and deep, had gradually been merged in a sort of personal disappointment. She had come out to her new life with such high hopes, and it had all ended in this! At first she meant to accept the system and work it out on its own lines. This failed when she found that it ground out poverty, dependence, and depopulation as by a mechanical law. Then, fatuously, she aspired to reform it, and that hope was now buried in a grave. The system had triumphed over her more than over all the rest of them put together. The only part before her now was the insignificant one of leader of fashion and ornament of the countryside. What a business, to be forever setting an example in trivial things, as one of the great exemplars of a nation perishing of the imitation of its betters!

"The old order, the old manners, the old faith-piteous to have to smirk one's

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way through all their proprieties, feeling all the while how they have lost their shaping virtue for the men and women of the time. A day in Mr. Raif's school as a preparation for the shock of our modern battle of life! A day in Mr. Raif's church! Really, some religions are not much better than some stimulants. The Dutch courage of these rites for the ordeals of poverty, pain, and death! And most of them so dreadfully old-fashioned, as if the chief business of the science of all the sciences was not to be perpetually renewing itself. with the larger outlook on nature, and the expansion of the mind and soul. Never has any church been the same thing, thank God, in any two ages, or even in any two generations. Man's religions are as the hairs of his head for number, and inevitably so. And Mr. Raif trying so hard to make us all letter-perfect in the prayer-book of the day before yesterday!"

The ray from the skylight, after illuminating the face of a pictured apostle, was now rendering the same service to a martyr. Nothing else had happened. The stranger kept himself to himself with a discretion beyond praise. He stroked his wounded hand from time to time, but he never once looked Augusta's way.

"And sometimes, to be fair," she mused, being still fancy-free, "the poverty of the discoveries, the mere islands under the lee that are mistaken for a continent! Our smart set touchingly busy under American leadership in applying the principles of the game of bluff to man's relations with his Maker-trying to will themselves into a good time, and the prolongation of it in earthly immortality. Religions that satisfy the sense of wonder, the sense of credulity, without making any troublesome demands on the sense of duty. Mere fancy patterns in believing, without even the tables from the Mount. Made-up mysteries of the great panjandrum, coupled with the right to do as you darned please. Life all apparatus. Automatic cures for drunkenness, and medicated baths for weakness of the will. Interesting quests for missing faculties stolen or strayed through the ages. Whole drawing-rooms full of Pointed Toes. trying to think anemic glands into energy, in the hope of coming on the track of their lost tribes of sense. Why not make the best of those you have? Marcus took overmuch pains in the enumeration of his

debts to the wise. He forgot his debt to the fools in teaching him what to laugh at and to loathe.

"Poor Points! on the issue of this warfare between them and the Squares turns the welfare of England, and of all human society. History is but a record of its varied fortunes. The Points had a merry time of it in the Italy of the Renascence, and, as we know, their symbol actually curled upward with the sense of successful aspiration to the mastery of life. But a time came!

"The time is coming here; and England 's going to win, and beat down its baser part under its feet. Let us have that faith in our race."

A fly buzzed, not without shock to the spirit of the scene. It was tumult of a kind. Augusta thought "shoo!" to it with the happiest results; and, after this triumphant exercise of will power, resumed.

Meanwhile the stranger had not been idle on his own account. He uttered no word, gave no outward and visible sign beyond the occasional stroking of the bandaged hand. He merely thought his thoughts, like his neighbor, but, by a law of sympathy which others may know how to trace, they flowed more or less in the same current as hers. For this is what he was saying to himself:

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'Real superiorities anywhere the rarest thing. Whole sections in church and state perishing for the want of them, and the mere caretakers not likely to be of much avail on England's coming judgment-day. I mind me of a certain sheep's carcass seen outside a butcher's shop at Christmas-tide, with its card to indicate high honors at Islington. Yet the throat bore witness to just the same treatment as that of the common fellows alongside which had gained no decoration. And the pompous victim had no doubt been hustled to his doom and stretched on the rack as rudely by the fierce tireman with the knife. Fancy its ineffectual bleat: 'Mind what you are doing! I'm a first prize at the cattle show!' At this stage, alas! it was but one sheep more."

In his next flight he almost touched Augusta mind to mind.

America, best of actual nations, no doubt, as once was England before it. But ware breakers! What are you going to

Americanize? Match factories and steam lines are nearly done; but social justice— how do you stand for that? America eaten up with the pride of life, with Europe waiting for a lead. Are you going to carry it and yourself farther, or only to sink back into mother's arms? Once the hope of the nations, now only their competitor and conqueror a very different thing! Money the too universal test: preachers and poets filing their return of income for the newspapers, to show how well it pays. Not less riches or less comfort for all, but a better share for some. What are you going to do about the back premises?

"Come over and help as soon as you can, if only for the sake of helping yourself. Society everywhere apparently under sentence of death for ill-distributed wealth -pomp and privation both exceeding all healthful bounds, with resultant deadness of soul and stint of body. For the last see factories and 'far-flung battle-line.'

Touching, yet foolish too, the idle rich everywhere, now so extensively resorting to cremation in the vain hope of giving the recording angel the slip. He'll find the body, you bet. Discourage, if possible, by suitable remonstrances. Cremation a good thing, but must be loved for itself.

"Will anybody give England a new type of young man, the nation's pride? The government might offer a prize. High marks for modesty, simplicity, earnestness, book-work in the things that count, and the power of 'swotting' at the art of life. General aim-highest possible differentiation from the snipe. Class 1, Young Men of Family; Class 2, Officers and Gentlemen; Class 3, Officers; Class 4, Sons of Toil. Extra prizes for young women to match.

"A new sort of person wanted very much everywhere. Meantime, the counterjumper may be of help. Strike, but hear. He is frugal, hard-working, obliging, and of a more than courtly civility. His whole life a training in these qualities, with their underlying self-denial and self-control. Has been under the harrow, no small part of it. A wise legislature should see that every child had a touch of this instrument at the start. It is far more important than the lancet; and, in this case, we might fairly abolish the conscientious objector. Similarly, little shop-girls (maids of all