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 ■
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 ST. OLAVE'S," " JANITA'S CROSS,' 
 
 " ANNETTE," 
 &c, &c. 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON: 
 HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 
 1879. 
 
 All rights reserved.
 
 LONDON : 
 PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, 
 
 BLENHEIM HOUSE.
 
 
 $11 
 
 v.l 
 
 THE LAST OF HEK LINE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " /~\H, lady, lady, please, lad}', do let me 
 
 , . ^S come in !" 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe, who was down on her 
 knees on the gravel walk, in stout apron 
 and gloves, trimming away the faded 
 flowers from her Sweet Williams, rose as 
 
 - quickly as she could — for at three-and-fifty 
 the family rheumatism had begun to assert 
 itself — and peering through the hedge of 
 lavender which was planted on the inner 
 side of the crumbling stone wall, caught 
 sight of a little freckled face, surrounded 
 
 VOL. I. B 
 
 4
 
 2 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 by a shock of curly brown hair, from which 
 its proper covering, a straw hat with blue 
 ribbons, had tumbled off, and was dangling 
 by its strings down the small wearer's back. 
 Miss Maplethorpe had been brought up 
 with considerable strictness in her own 
 childish days, and would probably have 
 bidden the little girl away, telling her that 
 it was not well-behaved to shout after 
 ladies in that way, and in the public road, 
 too ; but something in the tones of the 
 voice, so pleading and earnest, checked her, 
 and she was about to turn a more kindly 
 ear to the request, when she found that the 
 child had already taken matters into her 
 own hands, or rather feet, by running up to 
 the low wooden gate, the only place from 
 which a comfortable prospect could be 
 gained of the paradise within. Climbing 
 up, planting herself firmly on the middle 
 bar, and resting her little elbows on the top
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 6 
 
 rail, she was already gazing with wonder 
 and delight on the trim, old-fashioned gar- 
 den, with its wealth of roses, carnations, 
 sweet peas, and great swaying full-blossomed. 
 Florentine lilies, almost as tall as herself. 
 
 " What a pretty garden ! Oh, what a 
 pretty garden !" the little maid kept saying 
 to herself. u I wonder why Tantie doesn't 
 have such a pretty garden ! This must be 
 where the princess with wings lived, only I 
 don't see the fountain." 
 
 " Would you like to come in ?" said Miss 
 Maplethorpe, after a searching glance into 
 the eager little face. " It doesn't look nice 
 to see little girls standing on gates in that 
 way. Besides, you know, you might tumble 
 down and hurt yourself." 
 
 And the kind-hearted lady began to open 
 the latch, which was of a complicated sort, 
 involving a good deal of twisting and turn- 
 ing about of a chain and peg ; but as soon 
 
 b2
 
 4 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 as the child saw that entrance was invited, 
 she incontinently discarded preliminaries, 
 cleared the top rail with a spring, and came 
 right down in the middle of a grass plot, 
 where she doubled herself up like a ball, and 
 pushing the hair out of her eyes, began to 
 feast upon the fair summer beauty all round 
 her. 
 
 " Oh, the roses ! — oh, the big white lilies I 
 — oh, the pretty old house, with the funny 
 little windows ! Oh, I am glad Bunnie 
 went away — everything is so nice." 
 
 " What is your name?" asked Miss Maple- 
 thorpe, wondering where in the world this 
 odd little specimen of humanity had come 
 from. She had lived in Low Saxelby over 
 fifty years now, and had never seen 
 anything so pretty and comical and be- 
 wildering. 
 
 "Callis," said the child promptly, but 
 without ever taking her eyes from the old
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 5 
 
 stone cottage, tangled over with ivy and 
 rose and honeysuckle, which climbed to the 
 very tops of the clustered chimneys, and 
 smothered the latticed windows, until there 
 was scarcely room to look out of them. 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe started. Her worn, 
 quiet face flushed red. 
 
 " Callis ! — Callis ! — who gave you that 
 name ?" 
 
 The little girl stood up, dropped her 
 hands by her side, then, as if suddenly re- 
 collecting that that was not the correct posi- 
 tion, clasped them behind her, and looking 
 her interrogator full in the face, replied — 
 
 11 My godfathers and godmothers at my 
 baptism, wherein I was made a member — " 
 
 " Nay, nay," said Miss Maplethorpe, smil- 
 ing in spite of herself, " never mind the 
 rest. I did not mean to make you say all 
 that ; I only wanted to know where you 
 picked up such a funny name. Are you
 
 6 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 quite sure that Clarissa is not the proper 
 way of saying it ? Do they never call you 
 Clarissa ?" 
 
 The child had settled herself on the grass 
 again, evidently much relieved that she was 
 not expected to go through any more of her 
 Catechism. 
 
 " 1 don't know. I never heard anything 
 about the — the other person. Callis is my 
 real name, that I have marked upon my 
 pinafores and things, but my own name is 
 Mopsie — everybody calls me Mopsie ; only 
 when I am rather naughty, Tantie calls me 
 Mops, and if I am very bad indeed she 
 says Callis, but only when I am very bad 
 indeed." 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe had scarcely got over 
 her amusement at this barometrical grada- 
 tion of names, when her younger sister, 
 Phebe, came out of the ivy-covered porch. 
 Phebe was forty or thereabouts, sweeter-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 7 
 
 faced than her sister, but with not so much 
 intelligence in her expression. She had 
 large soft grey eyes, over which the lids 
 were generally half drooped, giving her a 
 pensive, nun-like appearance. 
 
 "Look here, Phebe, this little girl wanted 
 to come into the garden. She says her 
 name is Callis. Isn't it strange ? I never 
 heard of anyone being called by my name 
 before." 
 
 " I suppose it's Clarissa, properly," said 
 Phebe, looking kindly at the little waif, 
 who still sat there doubled up in a heap on 
 the grass plot, eagerly drinking in the beauty 
 of the summer flowers ; "but it is strange 
 her mother should have hit upon the same 
 way of shortening it as yours." 
 
 And then she added, having an idea that 
 the best way of approaching children was 
 through their appetites — 
 
 " Would you like a cake, little girl ?"
 
 8 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 "No, thank you," said Mopsie; "I'm not 
 hungry. I only want to look at the pretty 
 garden." 
 
 " Haven't you asked her who she is ?" said 
 Phebe to her sister. 
 
 "No, I really never thought about it. 
 Where is your mother, Mopsie dear?" 
 
 " I haven't a mother. Tantie takes care 
 of me, and so does Uncle George." 
 
 "And where is Tantie? Does she live 
 near here ?" 
 
 "Oh, no T said the child, evidently aston- 
 ished that anyone should betray such ignor- 
 ance of Tantie's whereabouts. " We all of 
 us live a long way off, and we had to come 
 in the train, and Tantie and Uncle George 
 wanted to go and see some one, and they 
 left me outside with Bunnie, because I 
 wasn't clean enough. Tantie says I never 
 am clean enough to go anywhere with 
 her."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 9 
 
 " And who is Bunnie ?" 
 
 " Bunnie takes care of me too. She's my 
 nurse. Why, don't you know Bunnie? 
 She has a little white cap on the top of her 
 head, except when she goes out, and then 
 she has a bonnet, and she goes with me 
 everywhere, to take care of me." 
 
 "Then why is she not with you now, Miss 
 Mopsie, to take care of you ?" 
 
 "Well, you know," and Mopsie dropped 
 her voice a little, and the faintest little 
 shadow of uncomfortableness came over her 
 face, " she wanted to go into a shop and 
 buy something, and she told me to stop 
 outside because my hands were dirty." 
 
 Mopsie here held out two brown paws in 
 confirmation of the statement. 
 
 "And she did stop such a long time, and 
 it was so stupid by myself under the lamp- 
 post, and I got so tired, and I came just a 
 little way to where there was a big green
 
 10 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 tree — oh ! such a pretty tree, and then I 
 came a little more and a little more until I 
 saw this beautiful garden and my feet 
 brought me to the gate, and then you know 
 you told me I might come in." 
 
 Mopsie's voice returned to its natural tone 
 when she got to the last few words of the 
 sentence. She evidently felt that in coming 
 into the garden she was acting under orders, 
 and might therefore dismiss even the remot- 
 est approach to penitence. 
 
 " But don't you think," said Miss Maple- 
 thorpe, who had just a little spice of the 
 didactic in her composition, the result of 
 circumstances, not character, for there was 
 not a sweeter-natured woman anywhere — 
 " don't you think it was rather naughty of 
 you, Mopsie, to go away from the lamp- 
 post when Bunnie had told you to stop?" 
 
 " Well, perhaps it was, just a little bit," 
 said Mopsie; ''but then, you know, Bunnie
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 11 
 
 had been naughty first, because Tantie told 
 her she was to take care of me, and instead 
 she went into the shop. And Bunnie is 
 very big, she knows all about everything." 
 
 The previous part of this argument being 
 unanswerable, Miss Maplethorpe shifted her 
 ground, intending to assail Mopsie at another 
 point. 
 
 " But now, supposing neither Tantie nor 
 Bunnie finds you any more, who will take 
 care of you then ?" 
 
 " Oh ! you will," said the child, with the 
 most exquisite insouciance. " I like you a 
 great deal better than either Tantie or 
 Bunnie. It would be so nice to stop always 
 with you." 
 
 And Mopsie came up and tucked her 
 dirty little hand into Miss Maplethorpe's, at 
 the same lifting her rosy lips for a kiss, 
 which the somewhat bewildered lady gave 
 with great good will.
 
 12 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 " Oh, come" said Phebe, who had been 
 standing apart, " this really will not do. 
 Why, Callis, the child is lost, that's just 
 what it is, and I'm sure I don't know what- 
 ever we should do with her if the worst 
 came to the worst ; I'll go and send Joan 
 into the road, and tell her she had better 
 keep walking up and down and try to find 
 anyone who seems to be looking for some- 
 body. The child cannot have come very 
 far away, or she would be hungry." 
 
 And off Phebe went. 
 
 " Wouldn't you take care of me ?" said 
 Mopsie, looking calmly up into Miss Maple- 
 thorpe's face with the wisdom of seven 
 years' experience of this wicked world. " I 
 would try very hard not to tear my frocks, 
 and I would always learn my hymns, and I 
 would keep my hands clean and everything." 
 
 " We'll see about it, little one," said 
 Callis, with something like tears in her
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 13 
 
 brown eyes. " But Tantie is sure to come 
 and look for you. At least I hope so," she 
 added to herself. 
 
 For the Miss Maplethorpes were very 
 poor, and sometimes could not so much as 
 afford to have meat once a day, so that the 
 prospect of an extra mouth to fill was by 
 no means a pleasant one, even though the 
 mouth were sweet and rosy as little 
 Mopsie's.
 
 14 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 TUST then a comely, middle-aged woman 
 " got up in rather costly array, and 
 accompanied by a strong-faced, smartly- 
 dressed girl of seventeen, came past the 
 open gate. 
 
 " Why, you there, with a little one, Miss 
 Maplethorpe !" said the matron, in accents 
 which did not quite comport with the rich- 
 ness of her brown silk and black lace 
 shawl. " Something must have happened, 
 I'll be bound, for I never heard tell of 
 your having any nieces nor anything of that 
 sort ; and a viewly little woman too, if she
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 15 
 
 was a bit better done [to. What a pretty 
 head of hair, to be sure !" 
 
 "Ma, don't talk so loud," said the girl, in 
 a grating under-voice, "ladies never talk 
 like that in the streets. Miss Maplethorpe 
 is not deaf." 
 
 The elder lady took no notice of this 
 reproof, but walked straight up and began 
 to examine the little Mopsie. 
 
 "A godchild, maybe?" she asked, tenta- 
 tively. 
 
 "No," said Miss Maplethorpe, "I expect 
 she is a child that has got lost. She came 
 in here half an hour ago, and seems inclined 
 to make herself quite comfortable." 
 
 " Ah ! tripper, I daresay. There's a 
 many of them comes to see the Abbey 
 church and things, though I don't set much 
 store by them myself. Nicely dressed too," 
 and Mrs. Atcherley began to finger the 
 child's dress. "A good quality brown
 
 16 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 holland this, cheap at one and three, I 
 should say, and I ought to know, for I've 
 had many a one through my fingers when 
 poor father had the drapery and grocery 
 business in Busselport. And a nice bonnet 
 too, a proper Dunstable, none of your 
 imitations, as I can tell them in a minute." 
 
 " Ma!" said the girl, in a frowning 
 whisper. 
 
 "It's a fact, Millicent," said Mrs. Atcher- 
 ley, innocently. " They make the imita- 
 tions now, so that if anyone hasn't been in the 
 business they might as easy be deceived as 
 not. But once you take it between your 
 fingers, then you know. A real Dunstable 
 straw's as soft as a piece of shoe leather. 
 You might wrap it up and put it in your 
 pocket, and it would come out as good as 
 new. But, Miss Maplethorpe, what are 
 you going to do? If I was you, I would 
 set the police to work."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 17 
 
 "No," said Miss Maplethorpe, " Phebe 
 told Joan to go out into the road and see if 
 anyone was inquiring, and she was just 
 going to the class-meeting herself, so I dare- 
 say she will be on the look out." 
 
 " Yes, most likely ; but there's nothing so 
 good as the police. We'll be going on our- 
 selves, and if 1 see anybody I'll just step 
 up to them and mention it. We're going 
 down the High Street to have a look at the 
 shops, and see if there's anything likely for 
 Selina. It's her birthday next week, and 
 her pa wants her a nice present made, as 
 she's eleven now. He says a pair of ear- 
 rings, but I tell him there's time enough for 
 that yet. Come along, Millicent." 
 
 And the two went away. They had not 
 gone far before they met a clerical gentle- 
 man, clerical from the crown of his soft felt 
 hat to the tips of his boots. He was talking 
 to a policeman in the middle of the road, 
 
 vol. i. c
 
 18 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 whilst a lady, who evidently belonged to 
 him, was standing at a little distance, looking 
 anxiously up and down the street. 
 
 " It's the very party, Millicent, " said 
 Mrs. Atcherley, in a loud, cheerful voice. 
 "Come along, we'll go and tell them she's 
 safe at Miss Maplethorpe's. Deary me ! 
 what a relief it will be, for there's no- 
 thing frets one like a lost child. I re- 
 member when your sister Selina was just 
 turned five " 
 
 " Ma, don't talk so loud," said Millicent, 
 scornfully ; " and let me go across and 
 speak to them. They quite have the air of 
 people of quality, and you do make such 
 mistakes in your grammar." 
 
 "All right, my dear. I'm sure your pa 
 pays enough for your schooling at Miss De- 
 bonair's, and I'm glad you can speak to the 
 quality with it. The lady don't look much 
 to me, with that black merino. I've seen
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 19 
 
 myself in a better ten times over, when father 
 was in " 
 
 Millicent was half across the road, motion- 
 ing to her mother to keep back, but Mrs. 
 Atcherley was not going to be treated quite 
 so badly as that, and trotted up to put in 
 her word, just as Millicent was beginning to 
 explain to them that if they were in search 
 of a little girl, she might be found at Miss 
 Maplethorpe's cottage, in the Abbey Farm 
 boundaries. 
 
 " If it's the same, ma'am," said Mrs. 
 Atcherley, breathlessly, "in a brown holland, 
 braided with white round the bottom, and 
 a real Dunstable, as I told Miss Maple- 
 thorpe " 
 
 " Be quiet, ma !" hissed the dutiful Milli- 
 cent, and then, adapting her tones to the 
 ears of the quality, added — 
 
 "The little girl is quite safe, and in 
 very good hands, and I am sure Miss Ma- 
 
 02
 
 20 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 plethorpe will take care of her until you 
 come." 
 
 And then, with a glance which took in 
 the entire cut of the lady's dress, and with 
 the bow which she had learned at Miss De- 
 bonair's finishing establishment, Millicent 
 drew her mother away, and they both went 
 down the High Street. 
 
 Meanwhile Miss Maplethorpe and her 
 small friend were cultivating each other's 
 acquaintance in a most satisfactory manner. 
 
 " Please, lady, may I go quite inside the 
 pretty little house, and then will you give 
 me some water to drink, and then will you 
 tell me a story ?" 
 
 As if perfectly certain that all these 
 requests would be granted, Mopsie tucked 
 her little hand still farther into Miss Maple- 
 thorpe's, where it had been at home now for 
 some time, and -began to pull her towards 
 the house.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 21 
 
 There was no denying the pretty, pleading 
 face, and besides it really was very hot out 
 there on the grass-plot at four o'clock of the 
 summer afternoon, so Miss Maplethorpe led 
 her little self-invited guest into what was 
 called the best parlour, a low, cool, shady 
 room, quite in keeping with the picturesque 
 outside of the cottage. It had a dado of 
 dark oak panelling round it, and oaken 
 beams, with carved bosses upon them, across 
 the ceiling ; and there was a corner cup- 
 board, and a broad, low window seat with 
 a red cushion, and a sweet smell of honey- 
 suckle came in through the open compart- 
 ments of the diamond-paned lattice. Some 
 wonderful pieces of embroidery, chiefly 
 from Scripture subjects, decorated the walls. 
 There were peacock-feather fans, evidently 
 of Indian workmanship, on the mantelpiece. 
 In the corner cupboard were some curious 
 little Japanese tea-cups and saucers, and on
 
 22 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 a very old-fashioned table in a recess stood 
 a Japanese cabinet and some animals carved 
 in ivory, and one or two sandal-wood 
 caskets. Except for these things the room 
 was very meanly furnished, everything being 
 old and worn and faded ; yet the cool, clean 
 air and the scent of the honeysuckles and the 
 soft shadow that lay upon everything gave 
 one a sense of home and comfort in the 
 place. 
 
 "Tantie has some cups and saucers just 
 like these," said Mopsie, as she stood on tip- 
 toe to look into the wonderful little corner 
 cupboard, "and they have men and women on 
 them with red and blue frocks, but we don't 
 keep them in a place like this, we have 
 them all in the china-pantry, and ladies have 
 tea out of them when they come to see 
 Tantie. And we have some of those pretty 
 feather things too, but our room isn't half so 
 nice as this — we don't have any flowers
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 23 
 
 round the windows. Please will you give 
 me a drink now ?" 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe led the child into the 
 kitchen. 
 
 " Joan ! Joan ! a jug of water, please." 
 
 And then, when no one answered, she 
 said to herself, 
 
 " Dear, dear ! but I suppose she has gone 
 upstairs to put on her afternoon frock." 
 
 " No, lady," said little Miss Mopsie, with 
 great complacency, " you know she is walk- 
 ing up and down the road to see if anyone 
 is looking for me. The lady with the pretty 
 eyes told her she was to go." 
 
 " You comical little mortal," and Miss 
 Maplethorpe reached down a china mug, 
 with the words "A present for a good girl" 
 upon it, and they went into the back 
 garden, where a pump as primitive as the 
 cottage kept a circle of cool damp green 
 moss round it under an old pear-tree.
 
 24 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Mopsie, who had never in her life made 
 acquaintance with anything but a " water- 
 works tap," looked on with astonishment, as 
 a few turns of the handle sent a gush of 
 sparkling water into the mossy stone trough 
 beneath. 
 
 "We don't have anything like that at our 
 house," she said, gravely. " I suppose it 
 is the fountain, and you are the princess 
 with wings. Only you haven't got the 
 wings." 
 
 " Certainly not," said Miss Maplethorpe, 
 leading the child back into the best parlour, 
 and taking her on her knee. 
 
 " But still, lady, you must be the princess, 
 because there is everything else proper ; and 
 now please will you tell me a story ?" 
 
 " Does Tantie tell you stories ?" 
 
 " Oh, dear, no !" said Mopsie, looking as 
 much surprised as though an}'one had asked 
 her whether Tantie generally stood on her
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 25 
 
 head, " never at all, and Uncle George 
 doesn't either, because he is always getting 
 his preaching ready. He has to preach 
 every Sunday, so he can't have any time, 
 and Bunnie doesn't know anything but 
 Jack the Giant Killer, and I have heard it 
 such a many times. Besides, it isn't about 
 little girls." 
 
 " Poor Mopsie !" and Callis Maplethorpe 
 pressed the rough, curly head to her bosom. 
 She would have been a loving mother if 
 Providence had given her bairns of her own 
 to cherish. 
 
 " But," continued the child, " there did 
 use to be such a nice gentleman who told 
 me stories about little girls, and he used to 
 catch me when I jumped downstairs, and he 
 cut out paper ladies for me, and he knew 
 about Red Riding Hood, and the little 
 woman that lived in a well, and the princess 
 with wings, but one day he stopped coming,
 
 26 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 and I don't ever see him now. Please tell 
 me your story." 
 
 " All right," said Callis, who for the last 
 five minutes had been diving into the 
 recesses of her memory in search of some- 
 thing suitable. At three and fifty, and with 
 many a troublous year between, the days 
 of fairy tales seem so far off. " Well, then ; 
 there was once a little girl." 
 
 Mopsie's blue eyes brightened, her pretty 
 little turn-up nose gave a delighted twitch ; 
 she folded her hands, crossed her tiny feet, 
 and looked up into Miss Maplethorpe's face 
 with that full rounded completeness of 
 satisfaction which only a child can know. 
 
 " There was once a little girl." 
 
 Suddenly a gentle flutter of feminine 
 draperies in the passage outside, a ripple of 
 daintily accented talk mingling with Miss 
 Phebe's more provincial tones, a waft of 
 Rimmel's latest perfume, and a subtle
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 27 
 
 essence of something more conventional 
 than generally found its way into that quiet 
 little room. 
 
 "Oh, thank you so much, so very, very 
 much. We have been so distressed, you 
 know, and I really had quite made up ray 
 mind that something dreadful must have 
 happened to the poor little thing. So 
 wicked of that wretched nurse-girl, was it 
 not ? and it has given me suck a fright." 
 
 Mopsie's hands dropped at once into the 
 first Catechism position ; that wonderful 
 third heaven light died out of her little 
 face ; she slipped quietly down from Miss 
 Maplethorpe's knee, and when the first 
 shock of surprise had passed, began to put 
 her hat on straight, and to pull up her 
 socks, which had slipped down into her 
 boots, and to make divers other attempts at 
 improving her appearance, whilst the ripple 
 of talk came nearer and nearer, and the
 
 28 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 perfume waxed stronger, and the rustle of 
 ■drapery more and more pronounced. 
 
 The speaker was a little lady of the pret- 
 tiest figure imaginable — all smooth, flowing 
 lines and graceful undulations — nothing 
 harsh, nothing angular, nothing loud about 
 her. Though her dress was only black 
 merino, concerning which Mrs. Atcherley 
 might truthfully say she had seen herself in 
 ■a better ten times over, there was an inde- 
 finable something in the cut and "set" of 
 it which fully justified Millicent's devout 
 admiration as she made that final bow in 
 the High Street. Her bonnet — they wore 
 them then like little plates on the top of 
 the head — seemed as if it had been blown 
 together by some Paris milliner, so airily 
 did its puffs of black tulle repose upon the 
 shining braids of dark hair beneath them, 
 so lightly did its jet trimmings touch the 
 forehead whose whiteness they served to
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 29 
 
 enhance. And then the dainty little ruffles 
 round throat and neck, and the faultlessly- 
 fitting black kid gloves, and the embroider- 
 ed belt outlining the slim waist, and the 
 dear little boots, with their coquettish front 
 row of mother-of-pearl buttons — the whole 
 toilette was such as had never before been 
 seen in Low Saxelby, much less in Miss 
 Maplethorpe's best parlour. No wonder 
 that that worthy spinster could at first do 
 little but look and admire. 
 
 And the pretty lady who wore all these 
 pretty things added a grace to them even 
 by her manner of wearing. Mrs. Male- 
 veron was delicately finished in every way. 
 She had slight, delicate black eyebrows, 
 roundly arching, soft brown eyes, and she 
 had a delicately-chiselled nose, a trifle sharp 
 at the tip, and delicately fine little lips, and 
 a soft, delicate, coaxing little voice, match- 
 ing the softness and delicacy of everything
 
 30 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 else about her. And when she talked, she 
 held up her chin so prettily, and had such 
 a way of underlining every third or fourth 
 word, to let you know that she really did 
 mean what she said. 
 
 " And, Mopsie — oh — oh ! Mopsie, how 
 could you do such a naughty thing ? If 
 you only knew how frightened I have 
 been !" 
 
 This was said to Mopsie, but the velvety 
 brown eyes were turned to Miss Maple- 
 thorpe. Most probably, if a gentleman had 
 been in the room, they would have been 
 turned to him ; but gentlemen were rare 
 things at the Manor Farm cottage. 
 
 Mopsie, having previously thrust her hand 
 into Miss Maplethorpe's for protection — 
 strange that a little child should need pro- 
 tection against anything so soft and lovely 
 as Mrs. Maleveron — now be^an to state the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 31 
 
 case, witli numerous small nods and gestures 
 of explanation. 
 
 "Bunnie did leave me to go into a shop 
 to buy something, and she told me I was to 
 stand by the lamp-post, because I was so 
 dirty." 
 
 Here Mopsie looked apologetically at her 
 socks. 
 
 " And I did wait, and I did wait, such a 
 long time, and I was very tired, and it was 
 so stupid, and at last I went just a little 
 way, and I came to this pretty house, and 
 the white lilies are so big, and they smell so 
 sweet, and the lady has a fountain like the 
 princess with wings, and there are some 
 little cups and saucers just like ours, with 
 men and women upon them, that we used 
 to have tea out of when the nice gentleman 
 that never comes now " 
 
 But here the lady stopped any further
 
 32 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 explanations. Looking at Mopsie, she said, 
 with not quite such a coaxing voice as she 
 had used to Miss Maplethorpe, 
 
 "It was very naughty of you, Mops, to 
 run away from Bunnie, and give us so much 
 trouble." 
 
 " Please, Tantie, I did not run away from 
 Bunnie. Bunnie ran away from me." 
 
 " Provoking little puss, is she not ?" said 
 Mrs. Maleveron, with a smile, to the other 
 two ladies. "And you know my brother 
 and I have been having such a hunt all over 
 the town, until I am so tired, oh ! so tired !" 
 
 "Will you not sit down and rest?" said 
 Callis Maplethorpe. 
 
 " No, thank you — a thousand thanks. I 
 believe our train goes almost directly, and 
 you know it would be such a nuisance if we 
 were to miss it. My brother is waiting for 
 us at the gate. Mopsie, come at once, we 
 have not a minute to spare. You know
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 33 
 
 some people very kindly told us where the 
 child had gone, or we might have been all 
 day looking for her. So provoking, was it 
 not ? And all the fault of that stupid girl. 
 She shall be dismissed at once. Now thank 
 you once more, oh ! so very, very much !" 
 
 And Mrs. Maleveron, with a glance 
 round the room as all-embracing as that 
 which Millicent Atcherley had cast upon 
 herself, though productive of very different 
 results, began to make her way out, leaving 
 Mopsie to be brought by Miss Maplethorpe, 
 to whom the child clung as if half afraid. 
 Poor people ; evidently quite countrified ; 
 might almost offer them half a sovereign for 
 their trouble, except that there was a slight 
 air of by-gone respectability about them. 
 
 " Come along, darling," she said, as the 
 child lingered amongst the flowers. " Uncle 
 George is waiting for us at the gate." 
 
 " I'm not your darling," said the child, 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 with a sturdy little set of her lips, which be- 
 tokened considerable decision. "I'm not 
 anybody's darling. I wish, oh ! I do 
 wish " 
 
 And Mopsie looked up into Callis Maple- 
 thorpe's grave face. 
 
 " I do wish that lady would love me." 
 
 Mrs. Maleveron seized the child's wrist so 
 tightly that Callis noticed the mark of her 
 fingers upon it when Mopsie had wrenched 
 it out of her grasp, and hurried towards the 
 gate. 
 
 "George dear, it's all right. These 
 ladies have been so very, very kind." 
 
 The clergyman raised his hat with grave 
 politeness. 
 
 "Would you like a flower, Mopsie?" said 
 Miss Maplethorpe, breaking off one of the 
 tall Florentine lilies and giving it to her. 
 
 The child's only answer was to bury her 
 face in the sweet white blossom, so covering
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 35 
 
 her little nose with yellow dust from the 
 antlers. 
 
 " You provoking child !" said Mrs. Maleve- 
 ron, in an almost inaudible whisper, giving 
 poor Mopsie a rub up with her scented 
 pocket-handkerchief, and then getting hold 
 of her wrist again and dragging her along 
 towards the gate, Mopsie turning back with 
 many a longing, lingering look towards the 
 garden. 
 
 " You know," she added, looking sweetly 
 at Miss Maplethorpe, with that pretty little 
 upward tilt of her chin, "it will be such a 
 dreadful thing if we do miss the train. 
 Good-bye, and thank you both, oh, so very, 
 very much I" 
 
 And so they went away. 
 
 " George, were they not two funny old 
 frumps ?" said the lady, as they crossed the 
 Abbey Close a hundred yards away. " Now 
 did you ever see two such old frumps ?" 
 
 d2
 
 36 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 "They were very kind to Mopsie, at any 
 rate," said George, gravely, and said no 
 more. 
 
 Mrs. Maleveron pouted. That was just 
 the way George always snubbed her if she 
 tried to say anything funny to him. 
 
 And Miss Maplethorpe, having watched 
 them out of sight, went back to the cottage 
 and sat in the ivied porch, thinking, thinking. 
 
 Memories of long-ago years were stirred 
 within her as they had not been stirred since 
 her early womanhood. For something in 
 the look of those blue eyes had strangely 
 brought back the past, and it seemed a dead 
 voice, and not the voice of a little child, 
 which said over and over again — 
 
 " I wish that lady would love me."
 
 37 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Xjl VERY stranger who passed through the 
 -" little country village of Low Saxelby 
 used to stop to admire a tumble-down old 
 house, probably of the sixteenth century, 
 which, well nestled in amongst elm and 
 lime-trees, stood midway between the 
 Abbey church and the river Saxel, to whose 
 banks the Manor Farm sloped gently down. 
 It was built of grey stone, with two or 
 three gables and a high-pitched roof, whose 
 red tiling was covered now with those lichen 
 tints of russet, orange, and brown which 
 artists love so well. Little dormer windows
 
 38 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 dotted this roof, while beneath, lattice case- 
 ments winked comfortably out through a 
 thick veil of ivy, honeysuckle, and climbing 
 rose. There was a little porch at one 
 corner, also of grey stone, and almost 
 covered with ivy. Under its gable was a 
 coat-of-arms belonging to the Boverley- 
 Carrolls, the present owners of the Manor. 
 A low stone wall, with a lavender hedge 
 inside, enclosed the garden, at the western 
 side of which a little brook prattled along 
 on its way to the Saxel river, a quarter of a 
 mile distant. 
 
 Across the road was a bit of pond, round 
 which might generally be seen a great 
 many very clean ducks, and a few very 
 dirty little boys, chiefly belonging — the 
 boys, that is to say — to the national school, 
 which was held in the tithe barn on the 
 other side the Abbey church. Higher up, 
 farther from the river, was the wheelwright's
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 39 
 
 shop, surrounded by the felled trunks of 
 trees, which made convenient see-saws for 
 the girls of the neighbourhood ; and close 
 by the pond was Dame Quigley's shop, 
 where the national school children bought 
 treacle- stick, marbles, string, mint drops, 
 and other necessaries of juvenile life. 
 
 The very stupidest of these national 
 school boys could have told a stranger 
 passing the pond that that old house with 
 its high-pitched roof and quaint dormer 
 windows was the very one in which Charles's 
 general slept the night before that Marston 
 Moor battle which ended the tale of the 
 poor King's struggles with English inde- 
 pendence. Also, he would probably have 
 added that in the upper room of the west 
 front, whose dormer window peered out now 
 through a veil of clasping ivy, that unfortu- 
 nate monarch's uncrowned son once took 
 refuge, whilst fleeing from Cromwell's
 
 40 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Ironsides, Saxelby being at that time a 
 well-known royalist town, and the occupier 
 of the Abbey Farm a yeoman who had good 
 hopes of getting rewarded for his loyalty 
 whenever better times came for the Stuart 
 side. 
 
 But if, having heard as much as this, the 
 stranger chanced to ask who lived now in 
 the picturesque old homestead, any linger- 
 ing look of interest would quickly have 
 faded from the urchin's face. He would 
 have said — 
 
 " Oh ! it's nobbut the two Miss Maple- 
 thorpes. They've lived there a vast o' years, 
 but nobody doesn't know nothing no more 
 about 'em." 
 
 And having dismissed the occupants of 
 the Manor Farm cottage with this needless 
 wealth of negatives, the lad would have 
 resumed his occupation of pelting Dame 
 Quigley's ducks ; or, had the stranger been
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 41 
 
 liberally inclined and rewarded his answers 
 with a copper or two, he would have gone 
 into the dame's little shop, and laid in such 
 a stock of marbles as would make him at 
 once a hero in the national school. 
 
 It was quite true. Few people in Saxelby 
 knew, and fewer still cared for, the two 
 Miss Maplethorpes who lived in the little 
 cottage by the brook. They were shy, 
 elderly, old-fashioned women ; plain of 
 dress, plain of speech, plain of face. They 
 had none of that subtle talent for getting on 
 in life, possessed by the typical Ruth of the 
 nineteenth century, who, going forth to 
 glean in the advertisement field of lady- 
 helps or housekeepers, finds it her hap to 
 light, not only on the territory of Boaz, but 
 upon Boaz himself, in the shape of a well- 
 to-do widower, who, in return for her pre- 
 possessing manners and excellent temper, 
 places her at the head of his table, and
 
 42 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 admits her to the uttermost privileges of the 
 barn, instead of the gleanings which fall 
 from the overladen reapers on their way 
 to it. 
 
 So for a good thirty years the Miss Maple- 
 thorpes had lived forgotten by the world in 
 that tumble-clown little cottage by the 
 brook-side, and those thirty years had 
 wrought such changes in Low Saxelby that, 
 excepting a few old people in the alms- 
 houses — Joan Latimer amongst them, who 
 got elected soon after the Mopsie episode, 
 in consequence of a fall which disabled her 
 from service — and one or two descendants 
 of the original corn and seed-merchants of 
 the place, few could look back to the time 
 when the sisters had not been pretty much 
 what they were at present, shy, elderly, and 
 unfashionable. 
 
 Callis, the elder, Clarissa being her 
 proper name, was, as we have already seen,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 43 
 
 well over fifty, and did not attempt to make 
 herself look a day younger. She had long 
 ago taken to caps, not the jaunty little 
 apologies in which the modern middle-aged 
 lady nods her head so coquettishly at the 
 advances of Time, but a good substantial 
 fabrication of white net, cut in the form of 
 a triangle, the line of its base being elon- 
 gated into a series of rosettes which came 
 down comfortably on each side of her face, 
 whilst the upper point, finished by another 
 rosette, fell behind over a very tiny remnant 
 of grey hair, whose shortcomings it con- 
 cealed. Even this distant approach to the 
 mode of the day was a concession to Phebe, 
 the younger sister, who, though conscien- 
 tiously giving up the pomps and vanities of 
 life herself, still liked the credit of the 
 family to be in a manner sustained by Miss 
 Maplethorpe. Callis's own yearnings were 
 for a real cap that tied under the chin and
 
 44 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 had a quilled border all round the face, like 
 the one their mother used to wear in those 
 pleasant far-off days when life for them had 
 as yet no lichen stains of age or trouble 
 upon it. 
 
 That younger sister, Phebe, had, as 
 Mopsie had found out, " pretty eyes," whose 
 soft kindliness made one forget the crows' 
 feet and wrinkles about them ; and there 
 was a touch of pink in her cheeks, and what 
 could be seen of her throat, above the frills 
 of snowy muslin which always surrounded 
 it, still showed the remains of exceeding 
 fairness. In the days when young women 
 always wore " low-necked dresses " of an 
 afternoon, the beauty of the shoulders thus 
 revealed by Phebe Maplethorpe had been 
 the admiration of all who were privileged 
 to see it. 
 
 " As white as white could be, they were," 
 said old Joan Latimer, " and to see her in
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 45 
 
 the pearl grey muslin with the coral beads 
 was a sight for a prince. And that wasn't 
 all, neither. I never saw her equal for 
 getting a rice-pudding so excellent as the 
 milk didn't cruddle nor nothing of the 
 sort, for Mrs. Maplethorpe, poor dear I 
 always brought 'em up to be useful. They 
 was none of your smirking misses as hasn't 
 a thought beyond laying themselves out to 
 please the men, or I don't misdoubt they 
 might have nipped up plenty afore now." 
 
 And then, lest her listener might think 
 she was partial, Joan would speak a good 
 word for the other sister. 
 
 " But Miss Callis had it for sensibleness. 
 Law ! what a sensible person she was and 
 is, and always has been, and could always 
 say something to you when you was in 
 trouble, as I was many a time when poor 
 father got stuck fast about that money as he 
 was nigh getting into jail for, and all along
 
 46 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 of no fault of his neither. Bless her ! she 
 was like an angel, she was. And she had it 
 for other things, too. I never see anybody 
 in all Saxelby town could come anything 
 nearhand her at a puff crust, because her 
 fingers was always as cool as a cucumber, 
 and is so to the present time. It's a rare 
 gift, is a cool hand and a light, when you've 
 a puff to do with. It doesn't matter so much 
 for a short crust ; butter'll do it then, and 
 I've known Miss Phebe turn that sort to 
 equal anything ; but you may have all the 
 Abbey Farm dairy at your elbow for a puff, 
 and if your hand isn't cool, it'll settle down 
 as sad as sorrow." 
 
 This used generally, when Joan's com- 
 panions were of the almshouse folk, to give 
 the conversation a decidedly culinary bias, 
 the pensioners neither knowing nor caring 
 much for the two Miss Maplethorpes, and
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 47 
 
 old Mistress Latimer beinsr the standing 
 authority of the neighbourhood for pastry 
 and sweets. Indeed when she lived maid- 
 of-all-work at the cottage, she often made 
 as much as five shillings a day by going out 
 to cook for dinner-parties ; for the sisters 
 could not afford to give her high wages, and 
 they always willingly spared her to make a 
 little extra for herself in this way. 
 
 "Not as I begrudged 'em my service for 
 the small wage," Joan always took care to 
 explain, "for they'd been that good to me, 
 I'd have served them on my bended knees 
 for love and nothing more, but folks must 
 live, and there was my old age to look to, 
 and me not thinking to get settled here, as 
 I never should, if it hadn't been for Miss 
 Call is once mentioning my poor father to 
 the vicar, and getting me in there to cook, 
 as Mrs. Borrowmont, bless her ! said I could
 
 48 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 clo that on one leg as well as two, which 
 has been a many shillings into my pocket, 
 it has." 
 
 And so on ; for Joan dearly loved a bit 
 of talk, when she got into pastry and sweets, 
 and the good families she had cooked for 
 in her time. But if her visitor happened to 
 be one of the Saxelby ladies — and a good 
 number of the Saxelby ladies did find their 
 way into that cosy little almshouse kitchen 
 of hers — the casual mention of the Miss 
 Maplethorpes was apt to beget a spirit of 
 curiosity, and questions were occasionally 
 asked relative to the age, former position, 
 and antecedents of the two quiet women 
 who had so little to say for themselves. 
 
 In that case, Joan, with a fine perception 
 of the fitness of things, immediately dropped 
 the conversation. Those were not " quality 
 manners," she would remark afterwards. 
 They never asked questions behind people's
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 49 
 
 backs that they dare not ask to their faces, 
 and she had not lived, bairn and maid and 
 woman, for well on to fifty years in the 
 Maplethorpe family, to go telling what she 
 knew to people who hadn't the sense to 
 find it out for themselves. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 50 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 T710R many and many a generation past 
 -*- the quiet little country town of Low 
 Saxelby had been slumbering by its river- 
 side in the midst of the richest corn-land of 
 the English northern counties. It had a 
 very respectable pedigree of its own, dating 
 back to Saxon and even Roman times. In 
 the twelfth century its monastery was founded 
 and its Abbey built, both being then richly 
 endowed by the religious liberality of the 
 ages called "dark." Henry the Eighth dis- 
 solved the monks; time and fire between 
 them did the same kind office for the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 51 
 
 monastery ; but the beautiful old Abbey 
 church still remained, its Norman name and 
 west doorway being the delight of archaeo- 
 logists, and its massive central tower a land- 
 mark for the level country round. Close 
 by the Abbey was the great tithe barn, now 
 converted into a national school, with quaint 
 bits of carving lingering about its lintels and 
 doorposts, and splendid accommodation for 
 jackdaws and sparrows in the grotesquely 
 ugly gurgoyles which leered out from under 
 its eaves. Beyond the Abbey precincts was 
 Miss Maplethorpe's cottage, which was built 
 in Queen Elizabeth's time for the yeoman 
 who managed the Manor Farm. The Manor 
 itself was a fine old building of a century 
 or two later, about a mile from the town, 
 giving its name to a hamlet called Manor 
 Saxelby, but conveniently shortened by the 
 town's folk into Mannersby. 
 
 The Manor Farm cottage, though lovely 
 
 e 2 
 
 • r\e ii i iMnic
 
 OZ THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 to look upon, had not for a long time 
 brought anything into the pockets of the 
 Saxelby feoffees, into whose hands it had 
 fallen ; because, on account of its proximity 
 to the noisy national school, nobody cared 
 to live in it, so that the good people had 
 not been guilty of any very serious stretch of 
 generosity, when, after it had been empty 
 for nearly a dozen years, and had fallen 
 into a most discreditable state of repair, 
 they allowed old Mr. Maplethorpe to occupy 
 it rent free. For many seasons it had 
 appeared regularly on the walls of the 
 Academy and other exhibitions as "An old 
 English homestead," "A Yorkshire cottage," 
 " The good old times," " A memory of the 
 past," and so on, being one of the prettiest 
 specimens of its own style of architecture in 
 the county. It was also a bonne bonclie for 
 all the drawing-masters of the town, who 
 used to perch on convenient stiles, hillocks,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 53 
 
 and fallen trunks of trees round it, such of 
 their pupils as were sufficiently advanced 
 to "sketch from nature," much to the 
 annoyance of the shy, retiring Miss Maple- 
 thorpes, who were frequently driven out of 
 their garden by schoolgirls poking through 
 the hedge with their parasols to get a nearer 
 view of the tinting on the raullions of the 
 casement windows, or wandering amateurs 
 asking leave to come bodily in and sketch 
 the place from a better position than could 
 be commanded outside. 
 
 Saxelby, after running its ecclesiastical 
 course, and getting its monastery dissolved 
 by the eighth Henry, took to educational 
 courses, and was chosen by Edward the 
 Sixth as a favourable locality for one of his 
 numerous grammar schools. This royal 
 endowment was supplemented in succeeding 
 years by bequests from the county people; 
 so that in due time Saxelby school became
 
 54 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 one of the wealthiest of its sort in the north 
 of England, and turned out good scholars 
 too, as the names of more than a few 
 bishops and deans, who had imbibed their 
 first Latin grammar there, remained to 
 tell. 
 
 In the course of following generations, 
 however, this grammar school suffered 
 almost as complete a dissolution as the 
 monastery, not through any royal warrant, 
 but only because of the laziness and greed 
 of those who administered its funds and 
 turned them from their original purposes. 
 The building which had been put up in 
 King Edward's time was allowed to crum- 
 ble away. A few idle professional men 
 were annually elected into the offices con- 
 nected with the charter, and received their 
 pay without doing any work for it. These 
 profits increased with the increasing value of 
 the lands attached to the foundation, until
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 55 
 
 they produced quite a respectable living for 
 the people who were fortunate enough to 
 get possession of them, whilst at the same 
 time the school, whose efficiency they were 
 supposed to maintain, dwindled down to 
 about half a dozen boys who were taught 
 Latin and Greek by a musty old man in an 
 equally musty old garret at the lowest end 
 of the town. 
 
 Of course Saxelby, in common with many 
 other towns which had grammar schools in 
 the same condition, knew that this was a 
 very disreputable state of things ; but it did 
 not trouble itself to stir into the matter, 
 having interests of quite another kind to 
 attend to now. For after getting its school 
 established, and tiring of it, and playing a 
 decent part in the civil wars of the Common- 
 wealth, and coming into a few substantial 
 benefits after the Restoration, in consequence 
 of its stout adherence to the Stuart interests?
 
 56 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 it quietly settled down and began to develop 
 its own resources of river traffic, which 
 occupation it had been steadily pursuing for 
 a hundred and fifty years. 
 
 The old town was placed very well for 
 this. For miles and miles on either side of 
 the river, east and west, stretched the fertile 
 valley of the Saxel, the finest district in all 
 England for corn and flax and timber grow- 
 ing. Thirty miles away, and connected 
 with it by this same river Saxel, was the 
 flourishing town of Busselport on the east 
 coast, to which vessels came from all the 
 great Continental ports. Accordingly Sax- 
 elby became quite a little centre for corn- 
 merchants who had not capital or enterprise 
 enough to establish themselves at Busselport. 
 The corn and flax and wool and timber of 
 the Saxel valley drained into it, and was 
 bought up from the simple farmers by 
 brokers who were able to sell at an enor-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LIXE. 57 
 
 mous profit by sending their goods down 
 the river to the east coast port. 
 
 Solid, substantial wharves and ware- 
 houses sprang up by the river bank. The 
 timber and flax sales were the most import- 
 ant in all the county, so important that a 
 building almost equal to anything in Bussel- 
 port was erected on purpose for them. 
 After it came a Corn Exchange, put up by 
 a public company, and thronged by hun- 
 dreds of farmers every market-day ; and to 
 complete the prosperity of the town, a few 
 enterprising individuals started a project for 
 the construction of a couple of miles of 
 canal, which, by directing the course of the 
 river away from a bit of shallow rocky bed 
 which impeded navigation, would make a 
 clear line of water traffic from Broad min- 
 ster, the old cathedral town on the western 
 border of the county, in the very centre of 
 the timber and flax tract, right through past
 
 58 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Saxelby to Busselport, thus making the 
 town, by means of its river, a sort of key 
 to all the agricultural commerce of the 
 county. 
 
 From the completion of that canal, about 
 the middle of the reign of good George the 
 Third, Saxelby really began to be proud of 
 itself. A fine place it was in those days for 
 the grain and timber-merchants and barge- 
 owners, whose big, comfortable red brick 
 houses, with roomy fruit-bearing gardens 
 behind — Mr. Maplethorpe's the biggest and 
 best of them all — lined the sunshiny old 
 High Street ; with here and there a solicitor's 
 office — for wealth brings law-suits in its 
 train — between them. It was a good thing 
 then to own a couple of barges ; better still 
 to have a score or two of shares in the 
 Saxelby canal, which paid such a generous 
 dividend to its proprietors ; but best of all 
 to inherit, as Mr. Maplethorpe did from his
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 59 
 
 father and grandfather, one of those grand 
 old corn-warehouses on the river bank, with 
 story after story running over with yellow 
 grain whicfh would be poured at such a profit 
 into the London-bound vessels which touch- 
 ed at Busselport. 
 
 For it was corn which formed the staple 
 of Saxelby commerce ; corn which gave such 
 splendid balances in the right side of the 
 banking-books ; corn which sunk the broad 
 barges shoulder deep in the canal as they 
 glided noiselessly along, drawn by patient 
 horses on the towing-paths ; corn which 
 broadened the shoulders and rounded the 
 faces and filled out the " bow-winders," as 
 they were irreverently called in those clays, 
 of the jolly old merchants who thronged 
 the Exchange on market mornings ; corn 
 which made those deep ruts in the turnpike 
 roads which converged from all parts of the 
 county towards Saxelby town. The very
 
 €0 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 place had a floury odour, and the people a 
 floury look. You could scent the town 
 afar off by the odour of newly-ground grain 
 borne by the breeze from many and many a 
 fat windmill that stood, with its miller's 
 cottage hard by, in the midst of meadows 
 and pasture-lands within a mile of the town. 
 The farmers coming in on Saturdays wore 
 pepper and salt suits, which looked as if 
 the cook's dredging-box had been emptied 
 over them. Every other man was either 
 carrying a bag of flour or driving a waggon- 
 load of it to one of the red brick ware- 
 houses. Monasteries were things of the 
 past ; Royalist tumults died away and left 
 nothing: but a charter or two behind them ; 
 grammar-schools rotted into inefficiency, but 
 corn was a permanent, indubitable, profit- 
 able fact, which endured from one genera- 
 tion to another, and left its balance at the 
 bankers when religion, politics and educa-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 61 
 
 tional excitements had alike passed away. 
 So said the fine old Saxelby merchants, 
 as they lounged down the High Street with 
 hands in their pockets, quoting the price of 
 grain, or the freight of timber, or the last 
 dividend paid by that jolly canal company.
 
 62 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Q<0 things continued until that restless 
 ^ modern spirit of progress, which never 
 can be content to let well alone, began to 
 vex substantial little Saxelby with rumours 
 of a railroad from Liverpool to Broadmin- 
 ster, which should pass the very outskirts 
 of the town, and gather up the merchandise 
 which for a century and a half had found 
 its way in such a quiet leisurely fashion down 
 the broad Saxel river. 
 
 A terrible prospect this for the barge- 
 owners and canal proprietors, who had 
 liitherto reaped such profits from their
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 63 
 
 monopoly of the trade of the district. Great 
 was the whispering and shaking of heads 
 on the Corn Exchange when the newspapers 
 announced that the bill had actually passed 
 through Parliament. However, there was 
 no help for it. The old order of things 
 must pass away, and well for those who 
 were able to save themselves in time by 
 making friends with the new. 
 
 So in due time the railroad was com- 
 pleted, some of the more adventurous 
 Saxelby merchants taking a goodly number 
 of shares in it ; others, with shut lips and 
 buttoned pockets, looking grimly on, saying 
 the place might go to rack and ruin if it 
 liked, and the mealy old country town once 
 more turned over a new leaf. 
 
 One by one the broad-shouldered barges 
 disappeared from the sleepy river ; one by 
 one the corn-warehouses were emptied, dis- 
 mantled, and finally pulled down, to be
 
 64 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 replaced by railway plant. Merchants and 
 brokers from Busselport built villas along 
 the banks of the Saxel, and over all the 
 pleasant country-side, which was now within 
 half an hour's ride of the busy seaport, and 
 the whole place began to assume the gilt 
 gingerbread appearance of a town suburb. 
 These merchants and brokers brought other 
 changes with them. They had not been 
 accustomed to let the grass grow under 
 their feet ; they had not been accustomed 
 to have money wasted and funds misappro- 
 priated under their very noses ; and when 
 they found that there was a grammar-school 
 in Saxelby, with a charter and a foundation 
 and an endowment of its own, and a good 
 slice of landed property in the best rent- 
 paying portion of the town, and that the 
 sole work it did was the teaching of half-a- 
 dozen boys by a musty old master in a 
 musty old garret, they one and all put their
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. . 65 
 
 heads together, and issued circulars, and 
 called a committee, and decided to a man 
 that that state of things must not be allowed 
 to go on a day longer. 
 
 Whereupon the trustees and feoffees, and 
 office-holders and money-receivers, cursing 
 bitterly this inquiry-vampire which had dis- 
 turbed with such a ruthless nightmare their 
 own comfortable and eleemosynary slum- 
 bers, had to rouse themselves, produce bal- 
 ance sheets, statements of accounts, funds, 
 rent-rolls, &c. 
 
 Newspaper fights ensued ; abuses were 
 brought to light ; right-minded people call- 
 ed shame upon men who had been receivers 
 of stolen money ; the whole pecuniary 
 history of the school for the last two hun- 
 dred years was ''tabulated" in a public 
 report, and the end of it was that a new 
 building was erected, a staff of masters 
 chosen with a thoroughly efficient man at 
 
 VOL. 1. F
 
 66 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 their head ; and in a dozen years from the 
 first rooting out of the matter, Saxelby 
 Grammar School was beginning to take its 
 place as one of the educational centres of 
 the north of England, and widows from all 
 parts of the country brought their boys to 
 the town for the benefit of the institution, 
 residence within the bounds of the parish 
 being compulsory. 
 
 Time would fail to tell of all the rest of 
 the things which these energetic and vigor- 
 
 O CD 
 
 ously practical Busselport people did in the 
 town of their adoption. Mechanics' insti- 
 tutes, co-operative societies, trades-unions, 
 libraries, debating societies, were only a 
 tittle of the things that they founded in the 
 comfortably unconscientious old place where 
 corn and flax had reigned for many a year. 
 Finally the Abbey church itself was attacked. 
 People pestered the old vicar out of his life 
 almost, by cries for restorations, daily ser-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 67 
 
 vices, surpliced choirs, intoned prayers, and 
 other things which had suddenly become 
 necessary to the due carrying out of the 
 religious idea. Poor dear Dr. Bonniwell, a 
 generous, fox-hunting, dole-giving old par- 
 son, who had contented himself for the last 
 thirty years with a ten minutes' sermon on 
 Sunday mornings and prayers in the after- 
 noon, made a stand for a little while ; but 
 newly-aroused public spirit was too much 
 for him, and he was vainly struggling in the 
 toils of improvement and progress when 
 relief came in the shape of preferment to a 
 canonry in the south of England. He hesi- 
 tated not, shook the dust of the over-busy 
 town from his feet, and retired to a good 
 old age of port wine and slippers in a 
 cathedral city where people were content to 
 do as their forefathers had done before 
 them. 
 
 Mr. Borrowmont succeeded him, a pleas- 
 
 f2
 
 68 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 ant amalgamation of the old order and the 
 new, who was rich enough to keep two 
 curates, and easy enough to let them have 
 as many services and perform as many genu- 
 flexions as they liked. Under him the 
 Abbey was restored as to its interior, a 
 surpliced choir instituted, and things general- 
 ly adjusted to that happy medium which 
 vexed neither high nor low. People were 
 only afraid he would be made a bishop too 
 soon, he being of that finely moderate type 
 which is far too useful to plod in the rear 
 of the church militant. 
 
 So now Low Saxelby, having, during the 
 previous centuries of its existence, passed 
 through phases which might be designated 
 as ecclesiastical, monastic, educational, polit- 
 ical, and commercial, had reached a stage at 
 which all these diverse developments had 
 become blended into one harmonious whole. 
 And the little town was wont to look at it-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 69 
 
 self in the glass of public opinion with 
 pardonable pride, everyone praising it as 
 one of the best administered, best governed, 
 most public-spirited and cultivated munci- 
 palities in the country ; all the different 
 interests of society being thoroughly well 
 represented in it, while no one class of the 
 population was allowed to encroach upon 
 the interests of any other, or to assume 
 to itself an undue importance in the 
 place. 
 
 But through all these revolutions the little 
 cottage had nestled unchanged amongst its 
 elm-trees. If the Royalist general, who 
 slept such an unquiet sleep there the night 
 before the battle, could have come back, he 
 would have seen but little difference, save 
 that time had nibbled away the mouldings 
 on the mullioned window through which he 
 had looked forth in the direction of Marston 
 Moor, and woven its garniture of moss and
 
 70 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 lichen more warmly over the reel-tiled roof 
 which sheltered his last dream of success for 
 the Stuart king. Still the sunshine rested 
 warmly, brightly as ever on the old home- 
 stead ; still the evening shadows crept up 
 and up, past vine and ivy-leaves, to the lat- 
 tice of the chamber where the second 
 Charles had hidden away in the days of his 
 wanderings ; and when the moonlight pour- 
 ed down in Summer nights over the gabled 
 porch, it brought out in bold relief that 
 Boverley-Carrol crest under which, in the 
 powdered times of good Queen Anne, the 
 stout old yeoman's daughter had listened to 
 a lover's talk. 
 
 No more lover's talk now in the porch. 
 Instead, two such quiet women sat there, 
 sometimes reading, sometimes thinking, 
 sometimes making sprigged net, to be sold 
 at a modest profit in Broadminster, for that
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 71 
 
 was their way of eking out an income 
 which otherwise would scarcely have kept 
 them in bread and cheese. How much had 
 they a year ? Why was the net always 
 taken to Broadminster, and sold there, in- 
 stead of at Low Saxelby, where many a 
 young lady would have bought it for ball- 
 dresses, hand labour being a thing more 
 prized than machine-work in those days? 
 Was it pride ? — was it shyness ? Had they 
 seen better days ? Did Mr. Atcherley really 
 send them a bag of flour once a month ? 
 and did they get the cottage rent free ? and 
 did they make a nice little penny in the 
 Summer months by letting people come 
 into the garden to sketch it ? 
 
 It was such questions as these that the 
 people used to ask old Joan Latimer, with 
 such answer as we know, the good woman 
 merely dropping the conversation, and re-
 
 72 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 marking afterwards, to one or other of her 
 companions in the almshouse, that " them 
 was not quality ways."
 
 73 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 rPHE lady who most frequently got a 
 -*- quiet little snub of this kind from 
 Mistress Latimer was Mrs. Atcherle}', wife 
 of Luke Atcherley, Esquire, as he was always 
 called in committee lists and printed reports, 
 the richest corn-merchant in Low Saxelby. 
 
 Mr. Atcherley's career was often quoted 
 as an example to the rising generation. He 
 begun business as a little grocer and flour 
 dealer in Broadminster, having previously 
 married Betsey, maid-of-all-work to Martin 
 Townley, the baker with whom he served 
 his apprenticeship. Betsey was a good,
 
 74 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 honest, rosy-faced girl, and had saved a few 
 pounds in service, and knew enough of 
 accounts to be able to " mind the shop " 
 when Luke went to market to Saxelby on 
 Saturdays. They were both steady, indus- 
 trious, hard-working people, and things 
 prospered with them, until Luke was able 
 to take an apprentice, and Betsey hired a 
 girl to help with the rough work, whilst she 
 devoted herself to cakes and biscuits and 
 penny pies, which her husband sold in the 
 shop at fifty per cent, profit. Then he took 
 a bakery, and gradually increased his flour 
 business, until he was able to make such 
 extensive purchases at Saxelby that the 
 small merchants there began to treat him 
 quite respectfully, even calling him " Mr.," 
 an attention which made Luke, who had 
 the ambition of a man within him, think 
 that the little shop at the back of Broad- 
 minster High Street was too small for him.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 75 
 
 He used sometimes in his leisure moments, 
 so lofty were the dreams which this " Mr." 
 awoke, to take a blank envelope and write 
 his own name with "Esq." after it, just to 
 see how it would look ; and he told Betsey 
 privately that she was never again to speak 
 of him to retail customers as " Atcherley," 
 that being the denomination by which he 
 had hitherto been known among them. 
 
 But these little peculiarities, the natural 
 efflorescence of an aspiring nature, never 
 kept him from watching the markets care- 
 fully, and buying when things were cheap, 
 and selling when they were dear ; and he 
 got on and on until he actually dropped the 
 grocery altogether and became a baker and 
 flour dealer — the latter wholesale, as the 
 public was informed by the board above his 
 warehouse — and Betsev no longer served in 
 the shop, but had two maids to serve her 
 instead, and the little village hucksters in
 
 76 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the neighbourhood did actually put Esq. on 
 Luke's letters, and he longed with a mighty 
 longing to burst the bonds of the retail 
 business altogether, and put on the wings of 
 the merchant, and expand to the full those 
 capabilities which he felt vaguely struggling 
 within his breast. 
 
 It was at this crisis that he heard of a 
 wholesale business to be disposed of in 
 Saxelby, and Mr. Maplethorpe, who had for 
 some years past known him as a steady, 
 industrious young tradesman, of a kind to 
 do well whatever he attempted at all, 
 offered to advance him part of the money 
 for buying it. Luke caught at the proposal, 
 fastened the bargain, sold the goodwill of 
 his Broadminster business for a fair round 
 sum, and made a fresh start with such 
 success that in a year or two from his 
 establishment in Saxelby, he was able not 
 ■only to pay back Mr. Maplethorpe's loan,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 77 
 
 but to free himself from all other debts, and 
 stretch his pinions bravely in the broad ether 
 of speculation, those being the pre-railway 
 times, when a merchant could buy his corn 
 cheaply enough from the simple farmers of 
 the Saxel valley, store it in those comfort- 
 able old warehouses by the river-side until 
 such time as the markets rose, and then 
 sell it at almost any price on the Busselport 
 quays. 
 
 There was only one drawback to his 
 success. Betsey could not rise with her 
 husband. As for H's she knew them not, 
 but that was only a small item in her short- 
 comings. Other women who ignored that 
 much enduring letter have risen to tolerable 
 social eminence. But Betse}^ set grammar 
 at defiance altogether, and would poke 
 about all day in her own kitchen and talk 
 to the maids of the time when she scoured 
 pots and pans with the best of them, and
 
 78 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 she seemed to think the noblest testimony 
 to her husband's character was borne by her 
 when she recalled those early days of the 
 bacon and candle business ; how Luke, bless 
 him ! always used to be up early and late, 
 and as obliging to a little ragged lad who came 
 in for a couple of farthing herrings as to 
 "Miss" Blatherniell herself, old Lawyer 
 Grindlay's cook, who, the shop being handy, 
 used occasionally to step over to give an 
 order for soft soap or black lead, which 
 they always bought by the gross. Betsey 
 was careful to mention that fact, it being 
 connected in her mind with the dawn of the 
 wholesale business. And as for cleaning her- 
 self and sitting down of a morning in the 
 best parlour, it Avas a thing she'd never been 
 accustomed to, and she scorned it. No ; she 
 w T ould look after her own kitchen, that she 
 would, or there was no telling where all 
 the candle ends would no to. And if
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 79 
 
 candle ends had not been a thing that she'd 
 looked after from the beginning, she should 
 like to know whether they would have ever 
 got into a wholesale business at all, she 
 should. So that Betsey did not raise her 
 husband's position greatly in Saxelby. 
 
 But she did better than that, for just as 
 he was beginning to feel his feet fairly 
 under him, she died, leaving him with two 
 children, Millicent and Thomas Borrowby, 
 aged respectively seven and three. 
 
 Of course he mourned her very sincerely, 
 but still he could not help feeling that she 
 had acted for the best in settins; him free 
 from that cable link which she formed 
 between the present and the past. After a 
 suitable period he began to think of marry- 
 ing again ; indeed, he had thought of it 
 from perhaps rather an unsuitable period, 
 having fixed his choice on Clarissa Maple- 
 thorpe, then a woman of five or six-and-
 
 80 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 twenty, within a few weeks of Betsey's 
 death ; but at the suitable period he made 
 his choice known, and to his very great 
 surprise, for he had now almost as good 
 prospects as anyone in Low Saxelby, was 
 refused. 
 
 He determined then to go farther in 
 search of a wife, and within a month of his 
 proposals to Miss Maplethorpe had won the 
 heart of Harriet Rotherby, a comely girl, 
 whose father had had a flourishing drapery 
 and grocery business in one of the villages 
 near Busselport. Having made a tidy 
 fortune there, he had retired to Busselport, 
 where he now lived in the ease and com- 
 fort which, as the copy-books say, a well- 
 spent life always insures. Harriet was his 
 only child, and would therefore have a tidy 
 fortune — almost as good as Miss Maple- 
 thorpe's, who was one of two — to put into 
 his own concern by-and-by.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 81 
 
 So they were married. Harriet made a 
 good wife. Like Betsey, she could cast ac- 
 counts ; but she could do more than that — 
 she could do wool-work, and play upon the 
 piano after a fashion, and make fancy mats 
 and fire-papers, and read, write, and speak 
 her own language with tolerable correctness, 
 besides being a good practical cook, though 
 without his first wife's decided tendencies 
 towards the kitchen. Indeed, for gravies 
 and made-dishes she was almost equal to 
 Joan Latimer in sweets and pastry, and that 
 was an excellence not to be despised, since 
 Luke's fondness for a good dinner had in- 
 creased with his facilities for getting it. In 
 fine, she was just the wife, as he thought, 
 for a man who was rising in the world, 
 and who wanted his children brought up to 
 their position. 
 
 In due time the second Mrs. Atcherley 
 became the mother of a little girl, christen- 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 ed Selina, as bonnie and buxom and blue- 
 eyed as herself; but as the little one grew 
 up, not even the most censorious matron in 
 Saxelby — and there were some very cen- 
 sorious ones amongst them — could say with 
 truth that the mother made any difference 
 between her own and the first wife's child- 
 ren. Indeed, Mrs. Atcherley was one of 
 those naturally good-hearted women who 
 would never think of doing such a thing. 
 It was her pride to feel that she did her 
 duty to everybody, and she carried in her 
 round fresh-coloured face, during those 
 early years of her married life, the content 
 which such a feeling might be supposed to 
 bring. 
 
 But as those early years passed away, 
 Mr. Atcherley, now a man of very much 
 mark in the town of his adoption, a leading 
 member of all the committees, and a step 
 or two only from the supreme civic dignity
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 83 
 
 of Mayor, began again to have an uneasy 
 consciousness that his wife was not fitted to 
 rise with him to that eminence which his 
 talents were rapidly achieving. • True, her 
 attainments were much in advance of Bet- 
 sey's, and so were her manners and appear- 
 ance, and as an ordinary member of the 
 lower middle-classes, she would have passed 
 muster well enough. But she was in the 
 habit of speaking with entirely too much 
 candour of her father's business in that 
 vulgar little village near Busselport ; and 
 instead of reaching forth in a worldly 
 sense to those things that were before, she 
 seemed to have a sort of regretful pleasure 
 in remembering the days of the little back 
 parlour behind the shop, and the tripe sup- 
 pers which her mother used to prepare for 
 Mr. Rotherby after the shutters were put 
 up, and the apprentices sent to their own 
 room. They were happy days, she said, 
 
 g2
 
 84 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 and she doubted whether times had bettered 
 with her since then. 
 
 That made Mr. Atcherley doubt whether 
 he had not slightly erred even in his second 
 marriage. Perhaps it would have been 
 better if he had followed the example of 
 a fellow-merchant, Mr. Dibthorpe, whose 
 spouse had also departed this life in the 
 dawn of her husband's prosperity. Mr. 
 Dibthorpe had waited several years, and 
 then, when his foot was firmly planted on 
 the ladder of success, he had married a 
 lady, who, though she brought him not a 
 pennyworth of profit in the shape of for- 
 tune, belonged to a eood family, with rela- 
 tions in the Army, Navy, and Church, and 
 she was now bringing up his children to 
 mix in superior society, and getting them 
 married off one after another into the best 
 families of Broad minster. 
 
 However, as Harriet, thanks to an excel-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 85 
 
 lent constitution and a cheerful temper, 
 showed no signs of cutting the Gordian 
 knot as Betsey had done, Mr. Atcherley 
 determined that his children should not 
 suffer from any remissness on her part ; so 
 as soon as Millicent was old enough to quit 
 the parental roof, she was sent with Bella 
 Dibthorpe to Miss Debonair's finishing school 
 in Broadminster, with directions that she 
 should be taught everything mentioned in the 
 circular. And Millicent profited so well by 
 the mass of information thus conveyed that 
 at seventeen she came home entirely compe- 
 tent to train up her mother in the way she 
 should go ; and had it not been for the 
 coign of vantage possessed by Mrs. Atcherley 
 in the fact of her father having been a well 
 to do draper and grocer, whereas Millicent's 
 mother began life as maid-of-all-work to 
 Townley the butterman of Broadminster, the 
 poor woman might sometimes have had a
 
 86 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 hard time of it. Selina, now a brisk little 
 maid of eleven, was going to Miss Debonair's 
 next half, and it was to furnish her forth 
 appropriately for that rise in life, that Mrs. 
 Atcherley, at her husband's request, was 
 going to buy the child a birthday present 
 of a pair of earrings, when passing Miss 
 Maplethorpe's cottage, she saw lost Mopsie 
 on the grass-plot, and went in to ask who 
 she could be. 
 
 Those Miss Maplethorpes were a standing 
 puzzle to Mrs. Atcherley. Why did her 
 husband show so much kindness and atten- 
 tion to them ? He was not a man who, as 
 a rule, parted cheerfully with his money y 
 except in sums large enough to be publicly 
 noted as instances of princely liberality. He 
 had a noble pride in distancing the vicar, 
 the lawyers and doctors, and even Mr. 
 Boverley-Carroll himself, in a subscription 
 list, and he was always ready with his five,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 87 
 
 fifteen, or fifty guineas for a testimonial 
 where the names of the donors, together 
 with the amounts, were put down in a busi- 
 ness-like way; but as for small charities which 
 did not come within the limits of a printed 
 report, Mr. Atcherley did not care much for 
 them. Yet for years and years past, let the 
 price of grain be what it might, he had sent 
 regularly once a month ten stone of the 
 best seconds to the Manor Farm cottage, 
 without so much as a penny of payment, 
 and a twenty yard length of black silk 
 every Christmas, and in preserving time 
 gooseberries and currants from the kitchen 
 garden as many as they wanted ; to say no- 
 thing of lending them the Times every day, 
 and books almost without end, thev beincj 
 women that spent a great deal of time in 
 reading, poor things ! 
 
 She should like to know how it was. 
 But if ever she ventured to ask so much as
 
 88 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 a question about it, Mr. Atcherley would 
 almost snap at her, and tell her to mind 
 her own business. Really, if it had not 
 been that she respected the Miss Maple- 
 thorpes so much, she should have had quite 
 an uncomfortable feeling about it ; but 
 they were so good and kind, and always 
 sympathised so nicely in what little she used 
 to tell them sometimes about her own 
 domestic difficulties, that Luke might have 
 given them half his property if he had 
 liked, and she would not have lifted up a 
 finger against it. 
 
 Only she must say it was strange ; and 
 try as she would, she could never get any- 
 thing out of old Joan Latimer about it.
 
 89 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A ND yet all the time there was really 
 -*--*- nothing in the circumstances, past cr 
 present, of the two Miss Maplethorpes to 
 make any mystery about. They had had a 
 common-place story enough, as the story of 
 many a woman goes in this world. When, 
 in the brightest and best days of Saxelby's 
 river traffic, Mr. Maplethorpe married, and 
 brought his bride to the old family house in 
 the High Street, one of those comfortable 
 mansions with big gardens behind, and re- 
 spectability-asserting iron palisades in front, 
 he had as good a position as anybody in the
 
 90 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 whole town. His father, and grandfather, 
 and great-grandfather before him, had lived 
 in that old house, and made money honestly 
 and truly, in one of the solidest of those 
 bulky warehouses on the river bank ; and 
 dying, had left behind them a good name in 
 the place, so that to be called a Maplethorpe 
 at all was to hold a heritage, so the people 
 said, as good as thousands of gold and 
 silver. 
 
 Philip Maplethorpe, the father of Callis 
 and Phebe, was not, as the phrase goes, a 
 money-making man. He was shy, studious, 
 unsociable, very diligent in business, but utter- 
 ly unable to avail himself of those little shifts 
 and by-ways of speculation which had made 
 the fortune of many of his fellow-merchants. 
 If he had not the talent of helping himself, 
 however, he helped others to the best of 
 his ability. More than a few flourishing
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 91 
 
 Saxelby traders owed their start in business, 
 and their subsequent success in life, to a 
 private loan from Mr. Maplethorpe, at some 
 critical juncture when a few hundred pounds 
 made all the difference to them between 
 prosperity and failure. 
 
 Luke Atcherley was one of these. Mr. 
 Maplethorpe had noticed his steady attend- 
 ance at the corn-markets, his quiet, methodi- 
 cal, business-like habits, how he kept at a 
 safe distance from the public houses, where 
 so many of the Broadminster bakers and 
 flour-dealers used to booze away the profits 
 of the week, and how, when he had got on 
 sufficiently to join the more respectable 
 farmers and corn-dealers at the " Golden 
 Bull " market-dinner, he persistently refused 
 more ale and spirits than he could con- 
 veniently carry, however the younger men 
 might chaff him, or the elders set him down
 
 92 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 as a screw. So when he heard that Luke 
 had the chance of a wholesale business in 
 Saxelby, if he could get anyone to advance 
 him a thousand pounds, he came forward 
 with the money himself, and Luke's fortune 
 was made. 
 
 Mrs. Maplethorpe was very like her hus- 
 band, a quiet, home-loving woman, with no 
 taste for keeping up appearances, though 
 the household was managed generousty, and 
 with the dainty neatness of the old times, 
 when a mistress's hand and eye were every- 
 where. Callis and Phebe were brought up 
 in the ways of their parents, carefully in- 
 structed by their mother in all feminine 
 handicrafts, needlework, cooking, and do- 
 mestic management, whilst their father 
 piloted them through the good solid litera- 
 ture which was fashionable in those days, 
 taught them to keep accounts, to manage 
 their own money affairs with common sense,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 93 
 
 and, above all, never to take unfair advant- 
 age of other people who might know less of 
 practical matters than themselves. 
 
 The girls were never sent to school, and 
 never encouraged to mix much with other 
 children, so that they grew up very like their 
 parents, shy, retiring, rather prim and old- 
 fashioned, and much accomplished in nothing 
 but the domestic virtues. Not at all the 
 sort of girls to "get off" and settle them- 
 selves advantageously, as some of the more 
 worldly-minded Saxelby matrons remarked, 
 though no doubt their father's property 
 would find husbands for them sooner or 
 later. 
 
 As indeed we have seen, it did in the case 
 of Callis Maplethorpe, for when she was a 
 woman verging on thirty, Luke Atcherley, 
 then a widower with two children, and one 
 of the most prosperous grain businesses in the 
 place, came forward to place these posses-
 
 94 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 sions, along with his own heart and hand, at 
 her disposal. But Callis, as we know, had 
 said him nay, and this was why. 
 
 Her own little love story was happening 
 on this wise. Years and years before, when 
 she was not much over twenty, a young 
 man, Martin Iselworth by name, had come 
 to Low Saxelby to act as head clerk in her 
 father's warehouse. He had no near kith 
 or kin that anyone knew of, and no money 
 and no prospects ; but he had the knightli- 
 ness of the true gentleman about him, and 
 the quiet simple manners which, with his dili- 
 gence and steadiness, soon made Mr. Maple- 
 thorpe feel a sort of fatherly interest iu 
 him. With the unpractically which fathers 
 often show in such cases, he brought the 
 young man to his house and made him at 
 home there amongst his own books and 
 papers and favourite pursuits, never dream-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 95 
 
 ing that other interests might creep un- 
 awares into his heart, or that his own quiet 
 daughter, with that small pretty head bend- 
 ing over her sewing-work, might learn to 
 think of her father's clerk as anything more 
 than a useful machine for the furtherance 
 of the business. 
 
 So the months went on, and neither Mr. 
 nor Mrs. Maplethorpe noticed that young 
 Martin Iselworth's eyes began to seek those 
 of Callis, and that when sometimes on sum- 
 mer evenings they all strolled out together 
 down the quiet country road towards the 
 Mannersby almshouses, his place seemed 
 naturally to fall by her side, and sometimes 
 they lingered behind together, looking for 
 the little ferns which grew nowhere so 
 rankly as among the mossy tree-roots by 
 the side of the brook leading through 
 meadows and corn-fields and copses to
 
 96 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the Boverley-Carroll house at Mannersby. 
 Callis was always such a girl for ferns, her 
 mother said, innocently, and now for the 
 first time she had found some one who cared 
 as much for them as herself. Such a 
 thought as her daughter having a lover had 
 never entered Mrs. Maplethorpe's head. 
 She had not brought her up to think of that 
 sort of thing, and they were all so happy 
 at home together, and so contented in their 
 own simple pursuits and interests, that 
 change of any kind seemed as unintelligible 
 as it was unnecessary. 
 
 But one day, when Martin had been 
 about a year and a half in the warehouse, 
 there came to him a letter from an uncle in 
 India, about whom he had known nothing 
 for many a year, except that he was an 
 indigo planter, and that he had quarrelled 
 with his people in England. This letter 
 was to ask Martin to come out and join him
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 97 
 
 on the plantation. Mr. Richard Iselworth 
 said he was an old man now, and wifeless 
 and childless, and the estate was flourishing r 
 and he should like one of his own name to 
 carry it on when he was gone, and if Martin 
 liked to come out and take to the concern, 
 he should have it for his inheritance, as a kind 
 of set-off against the vears during which his 
 uncle, knowing him to be friendless and 
 struggling at home, had left him to shift for 
 himself. 
 
 Young Iselworth took counsel with Mr. 
 Maplethorpe about the proposal. It was 
 too good to be allowed to drop ; too vague 
 to be entered upon until all possible 
 inquiries had been made. In those days 
 communication between England and the 
 North West provinces of India was not 
 quite such a rapid affair as it has become 
 since, and several months elapsed before 
 definite information could be obtained, 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 months during which Martin, feeling that 
 he had now probably something better than 
 his clerkship to depend upon, let his eyes 
 seek those of Callis perhaps a little more 
 frequently, and his hand sometimes linger 
 a little longer upon hers at parting; but, 
 if Callis knew, she gave no sign. The 
 Maplethorpes were not people to say much 
 about what they felt. Only at night the 
 girl used to sit by her window, which look- 
 ed out into the great leafy garden behind 
 the old house in the High Street, and in 
 those hours she learned that if Martin Isel- 
 worth went away to India, the love of her 
 life would go with him. 
 
 He went. The night before he said 
 good-bye to them they all had one more 
 walk by the brook side. Coming home, 
 they turned into the Manor Farm cottage. 
 It was unoccupied then ; it had been for
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 99 
 
 many a year, and the Maplethorpe family 
 used often to turn into the garden of sum- 
 mer evenings with their books and work, 
 and Mr. Maplethorpe would read aloud, 
 whilst the girls worked and Mrs. Maple- 
 thorpe made dainty little sketches of the 
 cottage on fancy cardboards, after the 
 manner common in her school days, when 
 she was considered to be one of the draw- 
 ing-master's most promising pupils. 
 
 But to-night they only sat and talked, or 
 strayed about amongst the flower beds, one 
 tangled wealth of untended rose and 
 lavender bushes, with tall white lilies over- 
 topping them to reach the sunshine. And 
 Martin drew Callis away into the old stone 
 porch whose doorway was almost hidden 
 now by the gnarled and knotted ivy stems 
 of three centuries' growth, and he laid his 
 two hands upon her shoulders, and looked 
 
 ii 2
 
 100 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 steadfastly down into her face, saying only 
 the one word — "Callis." 
 
 She knew what it meant. It told out all 
 that had been growing in their hearts for 
 each other during the years that he had 
 gone in and out of her father's house. No 
 need for her to speak ; need only to give 
 back look for look, and he kissed her there 
 under the ivy leaves, and from the branch 
 that he turned away to reach her lips, she 
 plucked one little leaf and gave it to him 
 to keep for her sake. 
 
 It might be months, or it might be years, 
 before he could come back again and fetch 
 her to be his wife, but they knew that they 
 belonged to each other, in a love which for 
 its very quietness was the faster and the 
 deeper. And there was golden summer in 
 the heart of Callis as she said good-bye to 
 him next day. He had gone from the sight
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 101 
 
 of her eyes, but he had given her the right 
 to keep him in her heart for ever. 
 
 And that was why Luke Atcherley's suit 
 did not prosper.
 
 102 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 P)ERHAPS that too was the reason why 
 -*- Mr. Atcherley, though rich and pros- 
 perous enough now, considering the little 
 time he had been money-making in Low 
 Saxelby, began to indulge a trifling grudge 
 in his heart against the man who a few years 
 before had helped him so generously. Not 
 that he hated him, not that he even disliked 
 him, not that he would so much as have lifted 
 up his little finger to injure him, but he was 
 conscious of the faintest tinge of satisfaction 
 when he reflected that Mr. Maplethorpe, not 
 being what is called a sharp man, would
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 103 
 
 probably lose a little of his money if that 
 new railway which people were beginning 
 to talk about, between Liverpool and Bussel- 
 port, did really pass through Saxelby. 
 
 For naturally a man does feel hurt at 
 being refused entrance into a family whose 
 alliance would be advantageous to him in 
 many ways, giving him not only prospective 
 wealth, but that advance in social position 
 without which wealth is comparatively of 
 little use. 
 
 And as Callis Maplethorpe's engagement 
 was not known except to her own family, 
 and as Mr. Atcherley had a fair amount of 
 self-esteem, fostered during the last few 
 years by the flattery and attentions of those 
 who wanted patronage from him, it was 
 easy to convince himself that, if he had been 
 allowed to push his own way with Miss 
 Maplethorpe, things might have been very 
 different. His heart was not wounded,
 
 104 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 or Harriet Rotherby would not so soon 
 have been invited to step into the vacant 
 position ; but his conceit was, and he longed 
 to salve that wound, not of course by doing 
 his former patron harm — such a base 
 thought as that, he was thankful to say, 
 would never gain entrance to his mind — 
 but simply by abstaining from doing him 
 good. That, at any rate, was perfectly fair 
 and lawful, especially in matters of business, 
 and of course it was only in matters of busi- 
 ness that they would have to deal with each 
 other now. 
 
 So he did not tell Mr. Maplethorpe what 
 he himself had made up his mind to do in 
 regard to that railway affair. If the subject 
 happened to be mentioned in any of their 
 meetings on the Corn Exchange, he merely 
 said that the scheme might come to pass, 
 or it might not ; for his own part, he thought 
 he should take no action at all in the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 105 
 
 matter. But at the same time he was care- 
 fully possessing himself of every grain of 
 information which could be gathered up, 
 and when he had reason to expect that the 
 bill really would pass Parliament, he stirred 
 about and sold his old river warehouses to 
 a man who was not so far-seeing as himself, 
 and bought ground for building a block of 
 new ones near the spot which he had 
 privately ascertained would be selected by 
 the railway company for their goods 
 station. The man who bought the old 
 premises was nearly ruined, rents going 
 down so on the river banks when it was 
 known that the first sod of the new railroad 
 had been turned, and he said somewhat 
 bitterly that he would never have taken 
 them at all but for Mr. Atcherley's assurance 
 that he believed the scheme would come to 
 nothing. But then, as the ex-butterinan 
 said, that was the buyer's fault, not his. It
 
 106 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 was not in reason that a man should hawk 
 about in the public streets private informa- 
 tion which he had obtained at great cost 
 and trouble. In business every man had a 
 right to stand up for himself, and if he 
 could get hold of a thing before other peo- 
 ple got hold of it, why, then it was part of 
 his stock in trade, and he was at liberty to 
 use it accordingly. 
 
 Knowing too that to be forewarned is to be 
 forearmed, he sold his canal shares while 
 yet there was a chance of getting a paying 
 price for them, sold his barges at the same 
 time to a steady jog-trot old merchant who 
 believed, or was made to believe, that 
 things would never change during his time, 
 invested the money in railway shares with- 
 out saying anything to anybody about it ; 
 and now was in a position, when things 
 really did begin to break up, to avail him-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 107 
 
 self of the very circumstances which were 
 ruining less clever people. 
 
 It is probably true, though an ugly fact 
 for that human nature which some people 
 believe in so generously, that when a man 
 has injured another man, especially if that 
 man be his friend, and has neither repented 
 of his fault nor been found out in it, he 
 finds it far more easy to injure that man a 
 second time, and to injure him more 
 deeply too ; and with each injury his covert 
 dislike to the injured one grows, until his ill 
 doing becomes a positive pleasure. 
 
 Something of this kind was beginning to 
 grow up in Mr. Atcherley's mind towards 
 Mr. Maplethorpe, though outwardly the 
 men were very good friends, chatting as 
 pleasantly as possible if they chanced to sit 
 side by side at the " Golden Bull " market 
 dinners, or to meet in the Exchange, where
 
 108 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the old established merchant had first met 
 and learned to admire the enterprising, 
 energetic young shopkeeper. 
 
 Mr. Maplethorpe, in common with a few 
 other Saxelby men, felt the pressure of 
 circumstances before things actually came to 
 the worst. Those fine grain barges of his, 
 that used to plod silently shoulder deep in 
 the water to the Busselport quays, were 
 scarcely ever chartered now by other 
 merchants, and markets were becoming 
 rather too tight for him often to fill them 
 himself. The canal was paying little more 
 than one per cent on the capital invested in 
 it. Expensive repairs were needed if it 
 was to be kept up in at all an efficient state, 
 and one or two shrewd business men from 
 Busselport and Liverpool had been heard 
 to say that rather than sink more money in 
 it, with the new railway pushing so rapidly 
 towards completion, they would throw up
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 109 
 
 the whole concern and not send good 
 money after bad. Business was being car- 
 ried on now according to new principles 
 which he was too old to master. He had 
 not energy enough to plunge boldly into 
 the new current of things and hurry with it 
 to success. 
 
 But still there was no change as yet in 
 outward appearances. People had not 
 begun to speak of that once flourishing 
 business on the Saxel wharf as " shaky." 
 Then too, the family always lived very 
 quietly, Mrs. Maplethorpe being such a 
 retiring, old-fashioned sort of woman, and 
 the dress and ways of the young people 
 were not such as to make great demands 
 upon their father's resources ; and then 
 everybody knew that, even if the corn trade 
 fell away altogether, he had a good deal of 
 house property in the town, part of it near 
 the new station too, where rents were
 
 110 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 rising; and so in any case, so long as he 
 could keep himself clear of bad speculations, 
 he might hold on comfortably, though 
 ever}'one knew as well as could be that 
 things were not as they once were with the 
 old merchants, whilst, with Mr. Atcherley 
 and the Dibthorpes and others of that set, 
 they were a great deal better. 
 
 Now, still further to add to the anxieties 
 of the good old Saxelby folk, it fell out that 
 in those days the grain markets became 
 exceptionally fluctuating. Prices changed 
 up and down, and to the uninitiated, with 
 as little reasonableness as Mrs. Dibthorpe's 
 restless green parrot showed when he used to 
 jump from perch to perch of his brass cage, 
 and a man needed all his wits to keep him- 
 self from losing an odd thousand or two by 
 buying in or selling out at the wrong time. 
 
 Mr. Atcherley knew this as well as any- 
 one, and fortified himself against circum-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. Ill 
 
 stances by having agents posted up and 
 down at all the important commercial 
 centres, and these agents told him how- 
 things were going, or likely to go, so that he 
 was able to fulfil one of the chief conditions 
 of mercantile success, namely, buying in a 
 cheap market and selling in a dear one. Of 
 course in doing this he had occasionally to 
 avail himself of the ignorance or simplicity 
 of those who had no agents at these afore- 
 mentioned commercial centres ; but then, as 
 he said to himself, that was their business, 
 not his. The knowledge which he gained 
 through these agents was part of his stock in 
 trade, just like the cleverness, prudence, and 
 foresight which enabled him to avail himself 
 of new railroads, failing canals, and other 
 accidents, which were only conditions of loss 
 to other people. Supposing he bought a 
 quantity of grain from a farmer, knowing 
 that on the morrow that farmer might have
 
 112 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 sold it for five shillings a quarter more, was 
 it his place to put the money out of his own 
 pocket into brother Hodge's by telling him 
 to hold off, and keep his corn a day or two 
 longer? Clearly not. If things went on 
 such principles as those, literature would 
 very soon have to give over writing me- 
 moirs of successful merchants, and the for- 
 tunes which sustained the great charitable 
 institutions of the day would quietly crumble 
 into dust. Or, if he sold to a fellow-mer- 
 chant at an exceptionally high price, know- 
 ing that in a few days the markets would 
 experience a tremendous fall, could any- 
 body blame him for getting his warehouses 
 emptied, in order to fill them at a profit 
 when men were glad to get rid of their 
 corn at any price ? Clearly not. Business 
 was business, let other things be what they 
 might. 
 
 So it chanced that, a year or two after
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 113 
 
 his repulse by Callis Maplethorpe and his 
 marriage to Miss Rotherby, he had a very 
 large consignment of grain which he wanted 
 to get rid of, his agents having warned him 
 that a fall in prices was imminent. At the 
 same time, Mr. Maplethorpe, not having 
 any agents to warn him, wanted to buy. 
 
 Conscience, and the remembrance of a 
 good turn done him long ago in the matter 
 of the purchase of that wholesale business, 
 whispered him to do as he would be done 
 by, to give his former helper the benefit of 
 the information which had come to him 
 from abroad, and so save him, as the pur- 
 chase was to be a very considerable one, 
 from the loss of several thousands of 
 pounds. But self-interest, and also that 
 curious craving after the power of inflicting 
 suffering, which had grown up in him since 
 the first wrong done to Mr. Maplethorpe, 
 whispered quite a difFerent story. Why 
 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 should lie save another at his own expense, 
 and that other one who had slighted him ? 
 Supposing he gave the hint, what would 
 become of his own overflowing granaries, 
 which must be cleared out at a loss, whilst 
 corn at a lower price was just ready to be 
 landed on the Busselport quays ? 
 
 Mr. Atcherley did what in his opinion 
 every right-minded merchant had the power 
 to do. Knowing that Mr. Maplethorpe 
 wanted grain — knowing, also, that he was 
 ignorant of the approaching fall in prices — 
 he went to him and asked him to take over 
 the corn which was crowding his own ware- 
 houses just then, assuring him that, in con- 
 sequence of circumstances which he could 
 not enter into — said circumstances being the 
 near approach of several large grain-vessels 
 from Russia — he could let him have it at a 
 lower price than would be asked by the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 115 
 
 brokers with whom he generally did busi- 
 ness. 
 
 Mr. Maplethorpe bought the corn, paid 
 down part of the price, and his warehouses 
 were filled. Next week prices fell enor- 
 mously. Atcherley got his granaries stocked 
 at an unheard-of profit, whilst Mr. Maple- 
 thorpe found himself burdened with produce 
 which he could not sell at anything like the 
 price it had cost him. 
 
 His affairs were just then at that critical 
 point when a very slight mistake is enough 
 to turn the scale to the bad. He became, 
 as the saying is, cc embarrassed." Brokers 
 and dealers at a distance, hearing whispers 
 of how things were going, began to press 
 their claims. The poor man battled on for 
 a little while, then the fight became too 
 hard for him. An unexpected call upon the 
 canal shares which he had bought from Mr. 
 
 i2
 
 116 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Atcherley crippled him still further, and 
 within twelve months of the arrival of the 
 grain-ships at Busselport, his name was 
 gazetted in the bankruptcy list.
 
 117 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PERHAPS there was not in the whole 
 country a man who would feel such 
 a, position more keenly than Philip Maple- 
 thorpe, or three women into whose souls 
 the iron of disgrace would brand so deeply 
 as it did into those of his wife and 
 daughters. 
 
 That sudden fall in the markets produced 
 several failures in Saxelby and Busselport, 
 but of them all, Mr. Maplethorpe's was the 
 most hopeless. Some of the other merchants 
 managed to struggle to their feet again, and, 
 after wiping off their debts in the bankruptcy
 
 118 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 court, and trading for awhile on borrowed 
 capital, got on more successfully than ever. 
 Others removed to a distance from the scene 
 of their disasters, and set to work afresh, 
 learning wisdom from experience, and leav- 
 ing the Saxelby field open for those who 
 knew better how to swim with the stream. 
 But Mr. Maplethorpe was too old and too 
 broken down to make a fresh start. 
 
 When the accounts came to be examined, 
 it was found that, after realizing the pro- 
 perty, the debts would be covered, and a 
 pittance of about fifty pounds a year left for 
 the family to live upon. There was a sale at 
 the old house in the High Street. Every- 
 thing was swept away, excepting a few old 
 pieces of furniture, and the Indian curiosi- 
 ties which from time to time had been sent 
 to Callis from her lover, Martin Iselworth. 
 The feoffees of the Abbey property, Mr. 
 Atcherley among them, deeply sympathising
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 119 
 
 with the calamity which had overtaken one 
 of their most respected townsmen, granted 
 him the use, rent free, of the old Manor 
 Farm cottage, which had been standing 
 empty so many years ; and there, a few 
 weeks after the bankruptcy, a white-haired 
 man and woman might have been seen 
 slowly tottering about under the deepest 
 shelter of the elm-trees, whilst their two 
 daughters sat in the porch, working sprigged 
 net, to be sold at so much a yard in the 
 Broadminster shops. 
 
 Yet doubtless even then, as was the case 
 many years later, strangers passing that 
 wonderfully picturesque old house, and see- 
 ing the two women at work in the porch, 
 thought what a lovely pattern of English 
 home-life the whole scene presented, and 
 how sweet a life it must be that was lived 
 under conditions of such outward beauty. 
 And so ended that most fortunate specula-
 
 120 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 tion which placed Luke Atcherley in the 
 foremost rank of Saxelby merchants. 
 
 Of course no one expressed more sorrow 
 than himself at the Maplethorpe downfall, 
 though privately his sorrow was not un- 
 mingled with that secretly-acknowledged 
 vein of pleasurable feeling which most men 
 are apt to feel when misfortune passes by 
 their own doors to knock at that of another. 
 However, as in duty bound, he dismissed 
 the pleasure as unworthy, and then went 
 through a mental process, for the purpose 
 of wiping out any stain of remorse which 
 might have vexed his righteous soul con- 
 cerning the share which he had had in the 
 catastrophe. 
 
 In the first place, he had done nothing 
 inconsistent with the accepted laws of com- 
 merce, which allow that a man's facilities 
 for acquiring private information are just 
 as much his own property as the corn in his
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 121 
 
 warehouses or the balance at his banker's, 
 and he has a right to use them as he likes 
 for his own advantage. Secondly, that if 
 Mr. Maplethorpe had not bought the corn 
 from him, he would have bought it from 
 some one else, and that he, Mr. Atcherley, 
 had, in fact, done him a favour rather than 
 the contrary by letting him have it at a 
 lower rate than other dealers, who did not 
 know of the approaching fall, would have 
 done. Thirdly, that if a little transaction 
 like that was enough to ruin a man, he 
 must have been in a condition to be ruined 
 anyhow sooner or later, and it was simply 
 a question of chance as to when it hap- 
 pened. 
 
 Having thus soothed his at first rather 
 smarting conscience, Mr. Atcherley went to 
 call upon his former benefactor, sympathised 
 heartily with him in his misfortunes, and 
 asked if there was anything in the world he
 
 122 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 could do for him. Nay, he went further 
 than that. He instructed a broker to buy 
 in at the sale several little articles of furni- 
 ture which had been in the family a long 
 time, and he asked the Maplethorpes to 
 make his house their home until the cottage 
 could be got ready for them, in the interval 
 giving himself a great deal of trouble about 
 it, and privately sending down the furniture 
 as a pleasant little surprise for them. And 
 he paid out of his own pocket the first 
 year's wages of Joan Latimer, the old ser- 
 vant, who refused to leave her master and 
 mistress in their distress ; and from that day 
 forward a sack of flour found its way regu- 
 larly every month from his own mill on the 
 Busselport road to the Maplethorpe back 
 door, not to mention numberless other use- 
 ful things sent in from time to time, so that 
 no one in Saxelby could say that he had
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 123 
 
 not acted like a man and a Christian, and a 
 gentleman too. 
 
 Bat the Maplethorpe troubles were not 
 at an end when the family settled down 
 with their scant remainder of worldly goods 
 in the Manor Farm cottage. 
 
 The disgrace of their failure had been too 
 sad a blow to Mrs. Maplethorpe. She was 
 always a nervous, sensitive woman, hiding 
 herself from the world because she dreaded 
 its peeping, prying censures, and the consci- 
 ousness that her husband was now a mark 
 for the scorn and pity and blame of the 
 town where he and his people had held 
 their heads so proudly for generations past, 
 proved too much for her. She slowly pass- 
 ed from one degree of morbid irritability to 
 another, until her reason failed entirely, 
 and after a few weary months of alternate 
 hoping and fearing, she was sent quietly
 
 124 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 away to the asylum at Broadminster. No 
 one knew much about it, the one or two 
 people who still took any interest in the 
 fortunes of the stricken family, being simply 
 told that she had gone away for change ; 
 and when, after a year or two of harmless 
 but hopeless insanity, she died, still no 
 explanation was offered, and nothing said 
 about her ailment. A curious family, a 
 very curious family, people remarked one to 
 another, so silent and reserved about every- 
 thing ; really it seemed as if their misfortunes 
 had affected their intellects. 
 
 His wife's death ended the tale ofMr.Ma- 
 plethorpe's troubles. For a little while he 
 dragged himself about, a feeble, broken-down 
 old man, and then he was laid by her side in 
 the family grave under the south window of 
 Saxelby Abbey Church, and the two wo- 
 men were left to struggle on as they could 
 in the little cottage. Very pathetic, Low
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 125 
 
 Saxelby said, and there the matter ended. 
 
 But what about the Indian letters which 
 for so many years now — that indigo planta- 
 tion not turning out so very prosperous 
 after all — had come with as much regularity 
 as the postal arrangements of those days 
 allowed ? 
 
 Callis took that matter into her own 
 hands. It never entered into her faithful 
 woman's heart that Martin Iselworth could 
 forsake her simply because her father had 
 lost his property, though with the pride 
 which had always belonged to her people, 
 she offered to set him free as soon as the 
 worst was known. And she did not mis- 
 judge him, either. .After hearing of the 
 family misfortunes, Martin wrote a manly, 
 loving, straightforward letter, in which he 
 told her that no money, sorrow, or trouble 
 could part them ; that he loved her for her- 
 self alone, and that, though these things
 
 126 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 might part them for a little while, nothing 
 but her own will should ever come between 
 them to put the sweet past away. Things had 
 not gone so well with him as he had hoped. 
 There had been bad seasons, year after 
 year, for the indigo. His uncle had died, 
 leaving the plantation encumbered with 
 debts arising out of the late losses, but he 
 was making his way steadily through them, 
 and if she would keep up heart a year or 
 two longer, he should be able to come 
 home and claim her for his wife. 
 
 So there was still sunshine left for one at 
 least in the cottage by the brook. Callis, 
 strong in the constancy of the man she 
 loved, worked on bravely with her young 
 sister at the net-sprigging which used to be 
 only an amusement to them, but was now 
 becoming quite a source of income to the 
 family, and at the same time taking as much 
 as she could of the burden of household
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 127 
 
 management from the weeping, pale-faced 
 woman upon whom life was pressing all too 
 heavily. And sometimes when the work 
 was done and all was still and quiet in the 
 little cottage, she would go out into the 
 porch and live over again the sweet summer 
 evening before Martin went away, and lean 
 her face — the youthful beauty quite gone 
 out of it now — upon that ivy branch which 
 he had turned aside to give her his first 
 lover's kiss. It was such a big, strong 
 branch now, with only the one leaf want- 
 ing which she had given him to keep for 
 her sake. And all sweet thoughts would 
 come to her there, making her so strong, so 
 patient for the morrow's life, with its little 
 cares and little pains and little wearinesses. 
 
 Until at last she slowly learned the truth 
 that upon their home had fallen the saddest 
 grief which without sin can ever come. The 
 very day that Mrs. Maplethorpe was taken
 
 128 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 away to Broad minster, Callis wrote to 
 Martin, telling him of the sore trouble 
 which had happened to them, and sadly 
 putting away from her once more the hope 
 which, since her girlhood, had been the joy 
 and stay of her life. 
 
 This time Martin Iselworth did not 
 resist. Perhaps that he did not, that he 
 could not bear as she could to cherish right 
 on through life a love which in life could 
 never find its fulfilment, brought that tinge 
 of bitterness to Callis Maplethorpe's face 
 which it never quite lost again, and gave to a 
 certain quaint humour, which had hitherto 
 sparkled on the surface of her character, a 
 touch of sarcasm whose sharpness made 
 others shrink a little from the woman they 
 could never understand. But as no one 
 out of the family knew anything, either 
 about the engagement or its termination, 
 the change in Miss Maplethorpe was set
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 129 
 
 down to the effect of family troubles, 
 enough, everybody allowed, to spoil a 
 nature which had never been over-full of 
 the milk of human kindness. Though why 
 they had not affected Miss Phebe in the 
 same way was more than could be told, for 
 she had the very face of a saint, and, as 
 Joan Latimer said, to sit and look at her 
 whilst she read the Bible at prayers night 
 and morning was every bit as good as 
 going to church any day. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 130 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 BUT Phebe had been led into, as she 
 would have expressed it herself, an 
 entirely different " providential path " from 
 that appointed for her sister. 
 
 The self-sacrifice which had been forced 
 upon Callis Maplethorpe as a plain and 
 simple duty, involving no question and 
 admitting no delay, came to Phebe glorified 
 by a halo of religious feeling which trans- 
 figured its whole aspect and made it seem 
 to her as an angel of light. 
 
 In the early bloom of her girlhood, and 
 before that mysterious entity denominated
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 131 
 
 " the world " had had time to exert its bale- 
 ful influence upon her, she had become 
 acquainted with the Primitive Methodists, 
 who had a select little society in Low 
 Saxelby. Mr. Maplethorpe rather enjoyed 
 the company of the minister, a good, quiet, 
 cultivated man, a lover of books, and a 
 foreigner, like himself, amongst the new 
 order of merchants, with their fondness for 
 champagne and electroplate and display. 
 He liked to have him often at the old house 
 in the High Street, and Mrs. Maplethorpe 
 liked his wife, and though they were good 
 church people themselves, occupying one of 
 the best pews in the Abbey, they did not 
 think it a grievous family trouble when 
 Phebe, lifting those sweet, grave grey eyes 
 of hers to her father's face, asked if he 
 would have any objection to her ''joining 
 the Society." 
 
 He had no objection, feeling, in common 
 
 k2
 
 132 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 with many sensible people, that different 
 natures require different spiritual food ; and 
 from that day — it was Phebe's seventeenth 
 birthday — she became one of the most con- 
 sistent members of the Primitive Methodist 
 Church in Saxelby, one chosen, as her class- 
 leader said, unto special grace, a vessel 
 sanctified and meet for the Masters use. 
 
 Henceforth that word, sanctification, be- 
 came the watchword of Phebe's life. She 
 was, as she thought, peculiarly set apart for 
 the Master's service ; and however much she 
 might, and doubtless often did, mistake the 
 direction of that devotedness, she never 
 faltered, either in heart or act, from any 
 sacrifice which it required. The chief call 
 which she felt was to withdraw herself from 
 all earthly attachments, to become, as she 
 expressed it — though she would have been 
 shocked to know that she was using a Popish 
 expression — the bride of Christ. And her
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 133 
 
 perfect obedience to this call, the cheerful- 
 ness with which she accepted the attitude 
 of " sitting loose " to all interests but those 
 of the world to come, gave her a chaste, 
 nun-like sweetness which was, after all, very 
 beautiful, since she blamed no one for not 
 being like herself, and was charitable 
 enough to believe that people might find 
 their way into the realms of the blest, as 
 they did into mealy old Saxelby itself, by 
 many different roads. 
 
 When the family ruin came, and that 
 family grief which was so far worse, Phebe's 
 faith never wavered. It was only another 
 phase of the Almighty's dealings with her, 
 one more step by which she was being led 
 on to that Christian perfection which asks 
 for nothing here below. And Phebe had 
 no lover to lose. She might have had 
 many a one, for her fair face and gentle 
 eyes had won her admirers, both amongst
 
 134 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the chapel people and the Maplethorpe set, 
 but Phebe drooped her great white eyelids 
 and said she had given her heart to God 
 when others asked for it. It was no figure 
 of speech. That renunciation of sweetest 
 earthly ties, which had been wrung from 
 her sister with much sorrow and a certain 
 lingering bitterness, was given by her as part 
 of that " counting of the cost " which is 
 the believer's privilege and responsibility. 
 Phebe had her human longings, but she 
 dared not give them way. It was all for 
 the best. Heaven would give her, she 
 used to say, what earth denied. And if 
 sometimes the loving heart within her called 
 out for food to still its hunger, she would 
 fall on her knees and pray God to be 
 enough for her, and then wipe away her 
 tears and come back to her work, calm and 
 grave and cheerful as ever. 
 
 Callis Maplethorpe's nature was cast in a
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 135 
 
 sterner mould. She could not, like her 
 sister, dismiss the longings of human life, as 
 well as its vexing problems, with an "Even 
 so, Father." She pondered over them, 
 fought them out with what appeared to the 
 gentle Phebe " a reasoning spirit," that very 
 spirit which her class-leader warned some of 
 the other members against, as being one 
 of the most dangerous devices of the enemy. 
 But in time Callis's bitterness wore itself 
 away against the wholesome friction of 
 much work and many cares. The beautiful 
 tenderness and strength of her character 
 came to light again. Only the sweetness of 
 the past was remembered. All the rest 
 took its place amongst those things which 
 have gone to the making up of life, but, 
 having done their work, may be wisely for- 
 gotten. 
 
 She had nearly come to this when, some 
 years after her father's death, she saw in
 
 136 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the Times — which paper Mr. Atcherley sent 
 them regularly every day when he had done 
 with it — the announcement of Martin Isel- 
 worth's marriage to the daughter of a Bom- 
 bay civilian. It made very little difference 
 to the quiet course of her life. If it did 
 bring back a tinge of the old bitterness which 
 had crept into her heart when her lover ac- 
 cepted the freedom which she offered him, 
 that soon passed away. She had not under- 
 stood a love which could change with any- 
 thing else than death and dishonour, and 
 she had thought that though he accepted 
 the destiny which separated them, still he 
 might keep himself "only" unto her, as she 
 was purposed to keep "only" unto him. 
 But this not being so, it was still well. She 
 loved him faithfully enough to be glad that 
 he should be happy in his own way ; per- 
 haps no human love ever goes farther than 
 that. And she did not need very long to
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 137 
 
 think of him as happy even in that way. 
 About eighteen months after his marriage 
 she saw the announcement of his wife's 
 death ; and. a year or two later, his own. 
 Since then she had heard nothing about him. 
 She had no friends in India. Martin Isel- 
 worth had none in England. All she knew 
 was that he and his wife were dead. 
 
 Only sometimes, as she sat in the porch with 
 her work, all the dear old past would come 
 back upon her. As in a dream she saw the 
 warmly-curtained dining-room of the High 
 Street home, and her father, in his big arm- 
 chair, and Martin reading to him, looking 
 into her face sometimes so earnestly that she 
 forgot her work, and put the sprigs in wrong, 
 and had to unpick them, which Martin al- 
 ways noticed with a smile. Or it was that 
 sweet farewell under the ivy-boughs, and 
 the first words of love spoken which gave 
 them to each other for ever. Yes, for ever,
 
 138 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 for surely he had awakened now, and knew 
 it all. 
 
 An old woman, people might have said, 
 to think of such things, she being well on 
 to middle age ; but love keeps the soul al- 
 ways } r oung. And so it was that at last a 
 pleasant afternoon glow of peace and con- 
 tentment arose upon the home which had 
 once been so full of sorrow. True, the 
 sisters were very poor, but they had the 
 pride of being able to earn their own living, 
 and of knowing that none were the worse 
 for any misdeeds of theirs. They lived to- 
 gether in harmony and content, Callis's 
 strong, clear common sense and practicality 
 supplying ozone to the mental atmosphere, 
 whilst Phebe's sweet and prayerful spirit 
 doubtless drew down a blessing on the 
 home more tangible than those which in 
 her moments of nearest access to the throne 
 of grace she besought. And perhaps, if a 
 
 3
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 139 
 
 stranger, passing that little cottage, with its 
 lichened roof and twinkling lattice case- 
 ments, thought how fair a life must be lived 
 there, he might not now have so much 
 mistaken. Unsuccessful, doubtless, as the 
 world looks at success, but the little frao;- 
 ment of our existence which is lived on this 
 side the curtain is too broken for anyone to 
 say whether, looked at in the larger light 
 of the life beyond, it may not have all 
 in it that is least worthy of the name of 
 failure. 
 
 This was how things were at the little 
 cottage by the brook side when Mopsie, 
 passing by, said so pleadingly — 
 
 " Oh, lady, please, lady, do let me come 
 in !"
 
 140 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 3 
 
 A ND now ten years had worn themselves 
 -*--*- away since Mopsie's flying visit, and 
 in all that time Callis Maplethorpe had 
 heard never a word of the brown-haired 
 little waif. Often as she lay awake of 
 nights, or dropped her work in the porch 
 to dream for awhile over the past, the clear 
 blue eyes would be lifted to hers again, 
 and she heard a wistful voice say — though 
 whether it was the child's or Martin Isel- 
 worth's, she scarce could tell — 
 " I wish that lady would love me." 
 And why the two always came together
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 141 
 
 in her mind, she scarce could tell either, 
 except that Martin's eyes had just that look 
 when, in the cottage porch that long-ago 
 summer evening, he had asked her to be 
 his wife. 
 
 It was a good thirty years since the Miss 
 Maplethorpes' troubles had begun, and all 
 that time they had been living rent-free in 
 the home which the charity of the Saxelby 
 Abbey feoffees had provided for them. 
 Chiefly through Mr. Atcherley's good 
 offices, that worthy body of men had de- 
 cided that so long as the two women lived 
 they should not be disturbed, though since 
 they went into it the place had grown to 
 look so pretty and home-like and well-kept 
 that no doubt anyone would be willing now 
 to pay a decent rent for it. Mr. Atcherley 
 used to say as much as this when he came 
 down once a year or so in his carriage and 
 pair, to show the Miss Maplethorpes that
 
 142 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 he had not forgotten them, although he 
 had become such a great man. And if 
 flour happened to be " up," he did not for- 
 get to tell them that too. Not that he 
 wanted to burden them with a painful sense 
 of obligation about that monthly sack of 
 best seconds, but the mentioning of the fact 
 gave him a feeling of satisfaction, something 
 like seeing his name printed in a charity 
 list ; and as that sack of flour could not be 
 put into a list along with the rest of his 
 subscriptions, the least human nature could 
 ask was to be allowed to talk about it new 
 and then. 
 
 Joan Latimer had left them now, having 
 been elected into the Mannersby almshouses, 
 and her niece Faith was supplying her 
 place, promising well, if matrimony did not 
 alter the even tenor of her ways, to become 
 as much a fixture in the place as Joan had 
 been before her. But Callis had begun to
 
 THE LAST OF HEK LINE. 143 
 
 notice of late that towards the end of the 
 month, when the sack of flour became due, 
 Faith was unusually particular about being 
 tidied up early in the afternoon, and Reuben 
 Sykes, the miller's man, a good-looking, 
 steady young fellow enough, used to spend 
 a needlessly long time in emptying his 
 burden into the big wooden barrel which 
 stood in the front kitchen, Faith always 
 being obliged to help, lest, as she said, "the 
 flour should get spilled and make such 
 deed as never was." Callis, a woman of 
 over sixty now, remembered her own early 
 years and said nothing. 
 
 Only a very few of the elderly gentle- 
 folk in Saxelby had known the sisters in 
 their best estate. The younger generation 
 spoke of them as "those Miss Maplethorpes, 
 poor things !" and indeed they had the air 
 of people who have been long ago forgotten 
 by society. Callis was short-sighted, and
 
 144 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 that constant bending over the sprigged net 
 had made her round-shouldered. She still 
 clung to the old-fashioned black net cap 
 with borders on each side and a bow be- 
 hind, hiding the little knob of now quite 
 gre} r hair which every year became more 
 and more scanty. Instead of the rich, 
 heavy materials which add a dignity to 
 elderly middle age, they were both of them 
 obliged to hide the ravages of time under 
 home-made alpacas of the thinnest quality, 
 the twenty yard length of black silk which 
 Mr. Atcherley still sent regularly Christmas 
 by Christmas, not unfrequently having to 
 be exchanged at Broad minster for its value 
 in a note to pay the butcher's bill. And 
 when they went to church and chapel they 
 always started very early, to avoid the 
 stream of worshippers whose devout adher- 
 ence to the fashions would have made their 
 own shortcomings in that respect quite too
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 145 
 
 humiliating. And if Faith had not loved 
 her old mistresses so much as to scorn say- 
 ing a word which might make them seem 
 less worthy in the eyes of the world than 
 they were in her own, she would have told 
 many a pitiful story of the nippings and 
 pinchings of poverty in that exquisite little 
 bit of sixteenth century architecture which 
 people from all parts of the county came to 
 sketch. 
 
 The two Miss Atcherleys had now quite 
 finished their education at Miss Debonairs 
 ''Establishment conducted on French princi- 
 ples." Indeed, truth to tell, Millicent had 
 a great deal more than finished it, being on 
 the very borders of thirty, and as far as ever, 
 apparently, from that advantageous matri- 
 monial settlement which her father had 
 in prospect when he invested so large a sum 
 in preparing her for life. 
 
 Millicent herself knew very well how it 
 
 VOL. I. l
 
 146 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 was that she had been so unsuccessful. If 
 it had not been for her mother's vulgar un- 
 educated ways, so different from those of the 
 society in which their father's position quali- 
 fied them to move, she conceived she might 
 long ago have made a marriage equal to any 
 of her school-fellows, and have been com- 
 fortably established in the professional circles 
 of Broadminster, if not amongst the Cathe- 
 dral people themselves. Bella Dibthorpe, who 
 was just her own age, and whose father had 
 not a quarter of the Atcherley wealth, had 
 managed to secure Mr. Bainsley, clerk to 
 the Cathedral Chapter, within a couple of 
 years after she left school, and was going 
 to the Bishop's " at homes " now, and get- 
 ting tickets for conversaziones and all sorts 
 of things, and dining with the canons and 
 getting them to her house, and in fact 
 floating on the very top of the society of the 
 place, and all because her father had been
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 147 
 
 sensible enough to marry a woman who had 
 good connections and could get the family 
 forward. 
 
 Millicent dared not visit it upon her father 
 that he had not married a woman with oood 
 connections, because he was a man who 
 would not stand that sort of thing ; but she 
 did mention it to Mrs. Atcherley pretty fre- 
 quently, and though that much-enduring 
 woman did occasionally take her stand upon 
 the superior merits of the grocery-drapery 
 business, as compared with the butterman's 
 kitchen from which the first Mrs. Atcherley 
 had emerged, Millicent's education upon 
 French principles was more than a match 
 for her stepmother's day-school training, 
 and she was generally left mistress of the 
 field, Mrs. Atcherley, number two, putting 
 on her bonnet sometimes, and slipping out 
 to pour her griefs into the sympathising 
 bosom of the elder Miss Maplethorpe. 
 
 l2
 
 148 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 "I'm sure, my dear," she would say to 
 that lady, "it's nothing but the very wish 
 and prayer of my life that she might light 
 upon somebody, even if it was a widower 
 with a family, and then she would know what 
 it is to slave and toil as I've had to do this 
 more than twenty years past, for it isn't 
 money that does it, when you've said all there 
 is to say. I was a deal happier, and there's 
 no need to keep it a secret, when Luke was 
 beginning to feel his way up after he took 
 to the wholesale business here, and we'd a 
 joint in the middle of the day with a plain 
 pudding after it, or maybe before it, if it 
 was suet or Yorkshire, for Luke always 
 liked the children to have a bit of pudding 
 before meat. He said it took the edge off 
 their hunger, and we could make a leg of 
 mutton last two days that way." 
 
 And Mrs. Atcherley heaved a sigh which 
 made the folds of her rich violet watered
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 149 
 
 silk creak again. Miss Maplethorpe, in her 
 black alpaca at tenpence a yard, was per- 
 haps the happier woman of the two. 
 
 " And to think, after that, how particular 
 he is about everything now ! I'm sure it's as 
 much as I'm equal to, to order him a fresh 
 dinner for every day of the week, and see it 
 come to table properly, though I've raised 
 the cook's wage to five and twenty only 
 this last quarter, just to make sure of the 
 pastry and side-dishes. And the wines, 
 Miss Maplethorpe, if they're not enough to 
 wear a woman's life out, I don't know what 
 is, and so there's an end of it." 
 
 To emphasize this somewhat strong as- 
 sertion good Mrs. Atcherley paused, and 
 Miss Maplethorpe took opportunity to ask 
 how they produced such an effect, for to 
 the best of her knowledge Mr. Atcherley 
 had always been, if not an abstemious, yet 
 at least a moderate man.
 
 150 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 " Oh, yes !" and Mrs. Atcherley bridled 
 up a little. She was not brought to that, 
 yet. "There's not a man in the place can 
 cast as much as a stone against him for ever 
 taking a drop more than what is proper and 
 respectable, but he's that careful about 
 knowing what's used, Miss Maplethorpe, 
 you would never believe it unless you had 
 my word. He puts it out himself when 
 we're going to give a party, according to 
 the number, and I have to keep account of 
 every cork that's drawn at the table. I'm 
 sure I'm that put out sometimes if anybody's 
 talking to me, and I hear a fresh bottle 
 opened, and I've lost the count, you might 
 read it in my very face, for he does cry 
 out so next morning if the corks don't 
 tally." 
 
 "Yes; but gentlemen are always particu- 
 lar about their wines, you know," suggested 
 Miss Maplethorpe, willing to give comfort,.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 151 
 
 but scarcely knowing where to find it. 
 " Mr. Atcherley was never a near man." 
 
 " No indeed," said his wife, with proper 
 pride. If it did relieve her to make little 
 remarks about her husband sometimes, she 
 was always, to do her justice, only too glad 
 to support anything that could be advanced 
 in his favour. " If you want nearness, you 
 must go to Mr. Dibthorpe for it. I know 
 for certain that he goes round after they've 
 been giving a dinner party and empties the 
 glasses into a spare decanter. That's what 
 I call being near, if you like. Luke was 
 never in that way, and I'm proud to say it 
 of him. Yes, and he stood up like a man, 
 he did, when they began to talk about close 
 bags for the collections, just a bit of mean- 
 ness of Mr. Dibthorpe's, the other church- 
 warden, you know, because he thought he 
 could slip in a sixpence if it wasn't an open 
 plate. Now did you ever ?"
 
 152 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe said she did not think 
 she ever did. 
 
 "No, I'm sure you didn't, and I must say- 
 it's a credit to the church to see my husband 
 go round with the plate, and always ready 
 with his half sovereign, or a five-pound note 
 if it's a special occasion, and goodness knows 
 they come often enough, now that we've got 
 the surpliced choir and all that sort of thing. 
 Not but what I've the greatest respect for 
 Mr. Borrowmont, only Luke expects me to 
 put in gold too, and when it has to come 
 out of the housekeeping it does fall rather 
 hard sometimes ; for if you'll believe me, 
 Miss Maplethorpe, there's never a sixpence 
 goes out of my hands but I have to give an 
 account of it. That's Luke's principle, and 
 he sticks to it." 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe, looking out into the 
 sunny little garden, thought there might be 
 worse things in this world than having to
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 153 
 
 earn one's own living in peace and quietness 
 by sprigging net for the Broadminster shops. 
 And then they began to talk about poultry, 
 which was Mrs. Atcherley's strong point. 
 
 Selina was a little more loyal to the spirit 
 of the fifth commandment, but even she 
 quite agreed with her elder sister that their 
 prospects might have been more promising 
 if Mrs. Atcherley had been a woman of 
 enterprise, like the female Lord of the Dib- 
 thorpe family. They were determined, 
 however, now to take things a little more 
 into their own hands, and make a push for 
 a social position as good as any in Saxelby, 
 at least, if they could not emulate the 
 glories of Mrs. Bainsley as wife of the 
 Chapter clerk. To this end they were 
 attempting to make the acquaintance of 
 Mr. Ducross, the head-master of the Gram- 
 mar School, a bachelor of middle age and 
 great attainments, who might do nicely for
 
 154 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Millicent if he could be brought to see mat- 
 ters in the same light ; whilst Mr. Anson, 
 one of Mr. Borrowmont's curates and second 
 master in the school, would, Selina thought, 
 be a suitable parti for herself. If their 
 mother would not help them forward, they 
 must really do something for themselves. 
 And as their brother, Thomas Burrowby, 
 or, as he preferred to be called, Burrowby 
 without the Thomas, who had gone out to 
 India in the Civil Service a few years before, 
 was coming home next year on furlough, it 
 would be an admirable opportunity for mak- 
 ing a few acquaintances, under the plea of hav- 
 ing society ready for him when he arrived. 
 
 The Miss Atcherlevs were clever girls, 
 really a credit to Miss Debonair and her 
 French principles.
 
 155 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 FT was one quiet Saturday afternoon to- 
 -*- wards the end of August. The leaves 
 were beginning to fall already, for it had 
 been a dry summer. Indeed, so thickly 
 were they falling from the elm-trees at the- 
 east end of the Manor Farm Cottage, that it 
 took all Faith's spare time to clear them 
 away, and make the garden look anything 
 like tidy. Perhaps Reuben Sykes knew 
 this, for when he brought the monthly sack 
 of flour he asked Miss Maplethorpe's per- 
 mission to stay for half an hour and do a 
 little bit of sweeping on the front walks.
 
 156 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe, like a sensible woman, 
 said she was very much obliged to him. 
 
 So there he was now, besoming away 
 with right good will, whilst Faith, with her 
 clean print apron tucked up, showing a 
 striped petticoat and a very pretty pair of 
 ankles, was gathering up the leaves in a 
 basket and emptying them into a hole which 
 Reuben had dug in the corner of the gar- 
 den, where by next spring they would have 
 developed into leaf mould and be ready for 
 the planting out of Miss Phebe's scarlet 
 geraniums. 
 
 The pleasant outdoor exercise, and per- 
 haps other circumstances connected with it, 
 such as an occasional rub up against Reuben, 
 or a touch of his hand when he helped her to 
 press the leaves into the basket, had brought 
 an unusual colour to Faith's always well- 
 tinted cheeks, and as she put herself into 
 one pretty position after another, now stoop-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 157 
 
 ing over the basket, now raising it on her 
 shoulder and lifting one round plump arm 
 to steady it there, now leaning her head to 
 one side to tilt over the leaves into the hole, 
 she looked as fresh and rosy as a little 
 Hebe ; or, as Reuben put it, doubtless stat- 
 ing the case more intelligibly to her, a as 
 strong as nails and as fresh as larks." 
 
 Of course that made Faith rosier still. 
 
 " You'll make a good miller's wife, 
 Faith," he said, " if you go on like that. 
 He'll none need a lad to fetch and carry 
 when he's got you." 
 
 Faith tossed her head, and said she was 
 going to the back to see if the leaves had 
 got into the pump. He might stay to the 
 front if he liked, and finish his work there. 
 
 But Reuben did not stay to the front. 
 
 After awhile a bank of heavy black clouds 
 rose in the west, and the wind fell, and the 
 tall white lilies never so much as nodded on
 
 158 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 their leafy stems, and the air grew hot and 
 heavy, and there came that hush and still- 
 ness over everything which is only felt 
 before a thunderstorm. 
 
 The two Miss Maplethorpes, " poor 
 things," — we may as well accept the epithet 
 for them, as scarcely anyone now ever men- 
 tioned their names without using it — were 
 sitting in their parlour by the window, the 
 spotless white curtains being drawn aside to 
 make room for as much air as could come 
 in through the open lattices. Callis was 
 trimming a bonnet, Phebe goffering cap 
 borders for the bishop's mother at Broad- 
 minster. Mrs. Mandeville was a beautiful 
 lady of the olden times, and she always 
 wore goffered cap borders of the finest net, 
 coming down under her chin, and no one 
 could set them so daintily as Phebe Maple- 
 thorpe, so she paid her so much a yard for
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 159 
 
 them, and that found Phebe in gloves and 
 boots and small things. 
 
 "There, I think that will do. Don't 
 you?" 
 
 And Callis, making a temporary peg of 
 her outstretched arm and hand, held out for 
 her sister's inspection a violet silk bonnet, 
 the result of two days' careful labour, held 
 it too with a thoughtful air of satisfaction at 
 the result achieved, utterly unconscious that 
 at church next Sunday half Saxelby, that 
 half which pretended to anything like 
 fashion, would be laughing at it, as having 
 come out of Noah's ark. 
 
 "Yes," said Phebe, "I think it will do 
 very nicely indeed. And violet always 
 suits you better than anything else." 
 
 Now Saxelby would have laughed again 
 to have heard this. As if to that faded, 
 worn-out, angular face one colour could be
 
 160 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 more becoming than another. But the two 
 sisters, never having been separated, seeing 
 each other from day to day, scarcely realised 
 how time had dealt with them. Phebe in- 
 clined to pale blue even yet, and violet was 
 " Callis's colour," as in the days of their 
 youth. 
 
 " Besides," she continued, " you manage 
 those soft crowns so nicely. I always say 
 nobody's crowns look nicer than yours, if 
 we could only afford better silk. You 
 would have given eighteen and sixpence for 
 that bonnet in Broadminster, even if you 
 could have got one to suit you so well, and 
 what has that cost ?" 
 
 " Let me see," and Callis began to reckon 
 up on the fingers of the disengaged hand. 
 
 " Two and nine for strings, and a shilling 
 for the cap front ; it always pays to have the 
 best, you know, for they last so much 
 longer ; and eighteenpence for the bit of
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 161 
 
 velvet for the bow behind, and then I had 
 the silk and shape by me. That's five shil- 
 lings." 
 
 " Just fancy! Thirteen and sixpence 
 saved," said Phebe, laying down a fresh 
 supply of straws for the goffering. " And 
 to look so nice, too." 
 
 " I'll make you one, if you like, Phebe. 
 There's that dove-coloured silk of mother's ; 
 it's no use keeping it lying by. There's 
 plenty for the bow behind too, so you 
 wouldn't want the velvet, and with a bit of 
 blue ribbon in the front it would look as 
 nice as could be.'' 
 
 " I wish you would, Callis, and then it 
 would be off my mind. I was so exercised 
 in chapel last Sunday morning, thinking what 
 I should do for the autumn. These perish- 
 ing bodies must be clothed, but it does seem 
 such a waste of time when we remember — 
 But," and Phebe let fall a whole handful of 
 
 VOL. I. m
 
 162 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 straws, " whoever is that gentleman, Callis?" 
 
 Callis started nervously, and looked 
 round for a place of shelter, not for herself, 
 but the bonnet; male visitors, except the 
 milkman, and, once a month, Reuben Sykes 
 with the flour, were very rare at the 
 cottage. 
 
 " No, he isn't coming in. T mean that 
 gentleman poking about at the trunk of the 
 willow-tree across the pond. One might 
 think he'd lost a sovereign in amongst the 
 bark." 
 
 Callis heaved a sigh of relief. 
 
 " You did give me such a start, Phebe. 
 I can't see who it is. I suppose it's some one 
 come to sketch the place. I wish the 
 feoffees would colour-wash it all over, elm- 
 trees and everything, and then we shouldn't 
 be pestered from morning to night with 
 people coming to take pictures of it." 
 
 " We can't have everything we like in
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 163 
 
 this world," said Phebe, smiling patiently. 
 "We should forget that we are strangers 
 and pilgrims here below, if nothing came to 
 trouble us." 
 
 Callis smiled too, but there was a certain 
 bitterness lurking round the corners of her 
 mouth. If troubles were wanted, one 
 might say the Maplethorpes had had a fair 
 portion in their time. 
 
 "You know, I sometimes think," con- 
 tinued Phebe, who had apparently for- 
 gotten the gentleman, " that things are go- 
 ing almost too smoothly with us now. 
 We have so little painful discipline in our 
 lives, and our path seems " 
 
 But the sentence never came to an end. 
 Just then a flash of lightning, followed al- 
 most instantaneously by a terrific peal of 
 thunder, drove the two women away from 
 the window. Callis, being of a practical 
 turn of mind, covered the fender and fire-
 
 164 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 irons with the hearth-rug. Phebe enveloped 
 her face in a shawl, and began to say- 
 to herself, in a low tone, her favourite 
 thunderstorm hymn — 
 
 " Great God, what do I see and hear ?" 
 
 " I don't fancy you can see anything 
 through that shawl," said Callis, irreverent- 
 ly, as her sister thought. " I'm sure I 
 couldn't, and as for hearing -" 
 
 " Oh, Callis! How can you? Such 
 awful feelings come over me at a time like 
 this. I never feel so near the unseen world 
 as when the elements are raging round 
 me. 
 
 " I feel pretty near it always," Callis re- 
 plied, going into the kitchen to fetch a 
 towel to put over the mirror. That mirror 
 was one of the things Mr. Atcherley had 
 bought in for them. She liked to amuse 
 herself in idle moments by recalling the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 165 
 
 different pictures that had been reflected in 
 it during the years of their prosperity. 
 And the different faces too, of which so 
 many would never be reflected there again. 
 When she came back the rain was pouring 
 in torrents. Going to the window to watch 
 it, she caught sight of the gentleman vainly 
 endeavouring to shelter himself under an 
 elm -tree just outside the garden gate. She 
 could see nothing of him above the laven- 
 der hedge but a wideawake hat with a 
 fringe of greyish hair sticking out round it, 
 and a pair of broad shoulders which formed 
 a splendid platform for the rain to play its 
 pranks upon. 
 
 "That poor man will get wet through, 
 Phebe," she remarked to her sister, as he 
 made an ineffectual effort to obtain a better 
 shelter under the elm-tree, its best side for 
 that purpose being the one which hung 
 over their own garden. "We ought to
 
 166 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 send Faith with an umbrella and ask hini 
 to come in; we can't do less." 
 
 Phebe gave a little shiver. 
 
 " Oh, Callis ! and the front passage only 
 cleaned this morning ! I wouldn't have 
 cared so much for a lady, but being a man 
 he will never think of the mats. And the 
 garden walk is a perfect pool already. 
 Suppose we ask him into the porch." 
 
 " We'll do nothing of the sort. If he is 
 to come in at all, let him come in properly. 
 Faith !" 
 
 Faith came. 
 
 "Faith, take out the big umbrella and go 
 to that gentleman under the tree, and ask 
 him if he would like to come in and shelter. 
 If he comes show him into the best par- 
 lour." 
 
 "Maybe he won't come, after all," she 
 added, reassuringly, to her sister, who was 
 evidently distressed at the thought of a
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 167 
 
 strange man in the house, " but still we 
 ought to ask him." 
 
 " Perhaps," said Phebe. "I always feel 
 that you know best when it's anything 
 important ; but, Faith, put an extra mat in 
 the porch for him to wipe his feet on, first 
 of all. Is he a gentleman, Callis, or would 
 it do to take him round the back way to 
 the kitchen ?" 
 
 " I think he's a gentleman," said Callis, 
 "but I can't see very plainly. At any rate, 
 he's not a kitchen person, I am sure. You 
 might take that shawl off your head now, 
 Phebe, there hasn't been a flash for nearly 
 a quarter of an hour." 
 
 Phebe took it off. Faith went out with 
 the umbrella, and the Miss Maplethorpes 
 drew a little nearer to the window to await 
 the issue. 
 
 "He's coming," said Phebe, the more 
 anxious of the two, as the object of their
 
 168 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 solicitude scrambled down from the little 
 rising ground under the elm-tree, and, 
 holding the umbrella over Faith's head, 
 just for all the world, as she afterwards 
 remarked, as if she had been a born lady, 
 made his way to the gate. 
 
 It was no flash of lightning that startled 
 the sisters as the broad, portly form fully 
 revealed itself on their garden walk ; but 
 simultaneously they rushed away from the 
 window to the farthest corner of the room. 
 
 •' Callis /" said Phebe, in accents of 
 horror, "it's the head-master of the Gram- 
 mar School." 
 
 "So it is. I am sure I didn't know 
 before." 
 
 "To think of our taking such a liberty! 
 And an unmarried man too. What shall 
 we do ?" 
 
 " Do ? Why we can't do anything," said 
 Callis, with a perceptible tremor in her
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 169 
 
 voice at the awfulness of the step they had 
 taken. u We must just wait and see." 
 
 " He's in the passage now," gasped Phebe, 
 but she said nothing about the mats. 
 
 A minute after Faith put her head in at 
 the door. 
 
 " Please, ma'am, the gentleman's come in 
 and thanks you very kindly, and he says 
 may he put out his coat and boots to dry by 
 the kitchen fire ?"
 
 170 
 
 c 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 JOHN DUCROSS, head-master of Low 
 
 ^ Saxelby Grammar School, correspond- 
 ing member of two or three foreign Insti- 
 tutes, and owner of any quantity of capitals 
 at the end of his name, was a man of about 
 forty-five, a bachelor — one cause of Miss 
 Phebe's horror at the step they had taken 
 in bringing; him into the house — and with a 
 great reputation for learning. Almost every- 
 body in the town, man, woman, and child, 
 knew that sturdy, square-built, somewhat 
 ungainly form. The big head belonging to 
 it, with its stiff, closely-cropped shock of
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 171 
 
 iron-grey hair, was the despair of all the 
 outfitters in Broadtninster, who had to send 
 to London on purpose for beavers and wide- 
 awakes large enough to pretend to cover it 
 decently. 
 
 Mr. Ducross had a magnificent long beard, 
 which doubtless covered many a defect in 
 the matter of ties and shirt-studs, for, though 
 particular as a Mussulman in the extent and 
 quality of his ablutions, he was anything but 
 a dandy as regards the outer man, and used 
 to be seen taking his walks abroad in gar- 
 ments which would have been the horror of 
 a virtuous wife. But then as he had no wife, 
 that was not of so much consequence. 
 
 Then everybody knew that he had a 
 dread of ladies' society. He could rarely or 
 never be got out to a mixed dinner-party, 
 even amongst the best of the Saxelby 
 people; and as for afternoon teas, nobody 
 had ever seen him at them, though Miss
 
 172 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Borrowmont, who occasionally had the 
 Boverley-Carrolls over for a cup of Pekoe, 
 had asked him a^ain and asrain. He loved 
 flowers with the delight of a child, and 
 never missed a Horticultural Exhibition, 
 either at Saxelby or Broad minster, but he 
 always used to get into the tents an hour or 
 two before the regular opening of the doors, 
 and his broad back might always be seen 
 disappearing through one end of the grounds 
 as the beauty and fashion of the town enter- 
 ed at the other. 
 
 There were rumours afloat amongst the 
 clergy of Broadminster, who had some of 
 them been his companions at College, that 
 this extreme aversion to the sex arose out of 
 a disagreeable experience which he had 
 passed through in his younger days. He 
 had been in love, so the saying went, with a 
 fascinating widow, who kept her brothers 
 house in Oxford, and would probably have
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 173 
 
 married her, had not a magnificent German 
 officer come upon the scene, and diverted 
 the lady's affections into a different channel, 
 whereupon he was so disgusted that he de- 
 termined never to place himself in the vi- 
 cinity of feminine charms again. 
 
 These rumours might be true or they 
 might not, but certain it was that for the 
 last dozen years, at any rate, John Ducross 
 had never of his own free will had anything 
 to do with the women folk, though, when 
 unavoidable circumstances brought him into 
 contact with them, there was a fine chivalry 
 about his manners which made them declare 
 that, if no one had spoiled him, he would 
 have been the most delightful husband in 
 the world. 
 
 In spite of his unassuming deportment 
 and simple tastes, the head-master of 
 Saxelby Grammar School had a great repu- 
 tation in the scientific world, and when there
 
 1 74 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 were Archeological, or Geological, or Social 
 Science meetings in any part of the country, 
 he might be seen going along arm-in-arm 
 with a lord, or a duke, or a German philoso- 
 pher, or a learned president, or something 
 of that kind, deep in discussion on one or 
 other of the subjects connected with the long 
 retinue of letters which followed his name 
 in print, whilst as for correspondence with 
 eminent men, and writing of u memoirs " 
 connected with his own special subject of 
 Entomology, there was no end to what 
 might be said, not to mention the improve- 
 ment in Saxelby Grammar School since he 
 took the control of it. 
 
 At least so the townspeople used to talk, 
 though there might perhaps be a little 
 exaggeration in it. Still, when all was said 
 and done, there were few people in Saxelby, 
 letting alone the lord of the manor himself, 
 Mr. Boverlev-Carroll — who, on account of his
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 175 
 
 wife being the Honourable Mrs. Boverley- 
 Carroll, had a link with nobility itself — more 
 thought of, more respected, more looked 
 up to with distant admiration, than John 
 Ducross. And this was the man whom the 
 Miss Maplethorpes had bidden into the 
 recesses of their poverty-stricken home. 
 
 No wonder they longed for the rain to 
 cease and him to be gone without further 
 word spoken, save, perhaps, a message of 
 thanks through Faith. For what should 
 they do afterwards if they happened to 
 meet him anywhere ? Should they appear 
 to know him again ? Or should they slip 
 past ? Or should they look straight forward 
 as if nothing had taken place ? And if the 
 rain kept on as it was keeping on now, 
 should they leave him there by himself in 
 the best parlour, or should they offer to 
 lend him their one respectable alpaca um- 
 brella — and men were so forgetful about
 
 VJ 
 
 176 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 umbrellas! — or should they send Faith in to 
 suggest a cab ? 
 
 Furthermore, in half an hour it would be 
 their usual tea-time, and, poor as they were, 
 they could not bring themselves to take it 
 whilst anyone whom they had asked into 
 the house was unbidden to break bread 
 with them. What was to be done ? 
 
 " There are those short cakes I baked 
 this morning," said Callis, contemplating 
 the possibility of the worst coming to the 
 worst. " I shouldn't be ashamed of offering 
 them to him, I think, for Joan herself says 
 you can't buy better in Saxelby ; and then 
 there are the little Japanese cups and 
 saucers ; poor father used to say any sort of 
 tea tasted good out of them. Phebe, I 
 think I might go in and say that if he likes 
 to stay — what do you think ?" 
 
 " Well, Callis, you know 1 always depend 
 upon you ; but if he does say anything about
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. . 177 
 
 ordering a cab, you will let Faith go at 
 once, won't you ?" 
 
 " Of course I will, and be very thankful 
 too," answered Callis, taking the towel away 
 from the mirror, and arranging the three 
 grey curls within each side of her cap 
 border ; " but I don't fancy he will say 
 anything about sending a girl out in such a 
 rain as this." 
 
 " Well, then, there's Reuben," said Phebe, 
 catching at any straw of hope. " Dear me ! 
 how it does pour down, to be sure ! He 
 would have been wet through over and over 
 again if you had not sent for him in, and 
 caught his death of cold, maybe. I won- 
 der if he easily takes a chill, and if he 
 wears flannels next his skin, and if there 
 is a matron or anybody at the school 
 to look after his things being aired — men 
 are so helpless about airing their own 
 things." 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 By this time Callis, having arranged her 
 cap, was going out of the room. 
 
 " Is the best parlour door shut, Callis ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Phebe came out and peeped cautiously 
 up and down the passage. 
 
 " Well, to be sure, there isn't so much as 
 a footmark ! He's never set a step down 
 but on a mat. That shows he's as thought- 
 ful as a woman. Come back as soon as you 
 can, Callis, and say if he means to stop tea, 
 and I'll get out the things myself." 
 
 After about ten minutes, during which 
 Phebe had slipped upstairs to change her 
 dress, Callis came back, looking much more 
 comfortable than when she went away. 
 
 " He's going to stay," she said, " but you 
 need not be a bit afraid. He's very pleas- 
 ant, and no nonsense about him, and sits 
 there without his coat just as if he was at 
 his own fireside. He came up and shook
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 179 
 
 hands with me, and somehow I felt at home 
 with him directly. He says he has so often 
 wanted to come and see what the cottage is 
 like inside." 
 
 11 If that's all," and Phebe curled her lip 
 as much as a good Christian has a right to 
 do, " Faith can show him round." 
 
 " No, it isn't that," said Callis, quite 
 warming up ; " he only said that to make 
 us feel that we were doing him more of a 
 kindness. You won't be a bit afraid of 
 him — you really won't. I fancy he likes to 
 sit and talk. He looked as pleasant as 
 possible when he said he didn't think the 
 rain would be over for a couple of hours. 
 Get the things ready, and come in as soon 
 as you can." 
 
 Callis was quite right. John Ducross 
 had not been five minutes in her company 
 — though of course she did not know that 
 was the reason — before he was experiencing 
 
 n2
 
 180 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 a feeling of domesticity which had never 
 yet visited him (luring the years of his so- 
 journ in Low Saxelby. He had but to look 
 into that shrewd yet kindly face, and notice 
 her perfect simplicity of dress, and manner, 
 and speech — simplicity evident enough even 
 through the haze of nervousness with which 
 she first greeted him — to feel that here was 
 a woman with whom the tricks and fineries 
 of social intercourse might safely be cast 
 aside ; and as the trial of the head-master's 
 career was that hitherto he had found no 
 woman, young, middle-aged, or elderly, 
 with whom they could safely be cast aside, 
 this experience was of itself enough to bring 
 a genial expression to his face, and to make 
 him quite ready to accept Miss Maplethorpe's 
 offer of such hospitality as the cottage could 
 give. 
 
 And then there was such a quaint air of 
 comfort about the little room, and Phebe,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 181 
 
 when she came in, looked so kindly at him 
 from those gentle grey eyes, and was so 
 anxious to know whether he was quite sure 
 that his feet were dry ; and the tea-table, 
 when Faith had spread it, looked so cosy 
 and cheerful, except that those Japanese 
 cups and saucers — where could they have 
 come from ? — brought back something he 
 would rather have forgotten, and the short- 
 cakes were simply perfect, and everything 
 was cosy and homelike and pleasant, so 
 different from his big, four-square room at the 
 Grammar School, where there were no niches 
 nor nooks nor corners anywhere, only a 
 general air of vastness and ventilation ; and 
 after all, one needs more than vastness and 
 ventilation to go through life with. 
 
 So the end of it was that he stayed all the 
 evening, and when at last he did go away, 
 he took with him the Maplethorpe alpaca 
 umbrella, not so much as a protector against
 
 182 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 possible rain as an excuse for another visit 
 in order to return it. For he meant to 
 know more of the two quiet women who 
 had given him his first experience of real 
 home comfort in Saxelby. 
 
 "I don't think you did amiss to ask him 
 in, after all, Callis," said Phebe, when the 
 visit was over. " He didn't seem to con- 
 sider it a liberty, and I'm sure he enjoyed 
 the short-cakes very much. But, dear me ! 
 what I felt, to be sure, when I saw him 
 coming up the walk and knew who it was. 
 You might have knocked me down with a 
 feather. And, Callis, I had no idea you 
 could talk in that way." 
 
 "That way" referred to a conversation 
 which Miss Maplethorpe had got into with 
 the head-master about the education of 
 women — a conversation in which she 
 showed a store of good sense, reading.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 183 
 
 and intelligence which did not often find 
 any opportunity of coming to the front ; 
 Phebe not having what is called a culti- 
 vated mind, though she had pleasant, 
 sensible notions about most things, and the 
 only other people with whom Callis ever 
 had a chance of conversing freely, being 
 Mrs. Atcherley and Joan Latimer, neither 
 of whom could be said to take a definite 
 interest in education. 
 
 " Well, you know, Phebe," said Callis, 
 innocently, " I always can get on so much 
 better with a gentleman." 
 
 Phebe looked reproachful. 
 
 " Oh, sister,' 1 she replied, " for shame !" 
 imagining that only the sex of the individual 
 in question was referred to. "How can 
 you? 
 
 The faintest little tinge of red crept up 
 amongst the blue veins on Callis Maple-
 
 184 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 thorpe's temples. It was one of her peculi- 
 arities that at sixty-two she had not given 
 over blushing. 
 
 " I didn't mean that, Phebe. I meant 
 that it is so much pleasanter to have to do 
 with a born gentleman who knows what to 
 say and what to leave unsaid. For instance, 
 Mr. Atcherley is so different." 
 
 " Oh, yes ! If that is what you mean, it is 
 all right ; but it did sound so curious, Callis, 
 to hear you say it before. Mr. Ducross 
 makes you feel somehow that you need not 
 be afraid of letting him see you just as you 
 are. I wonder if he will ever come again. 
 He might bring back that umbrella, you 
 know. But, Callis, don't let us get into un- 
 profitable speculations. Everything will be 
 for the best, however it happens." 
 
 " Of course, Phebe. It was not I who 
 wondered whether he would come again." 
 
 After that they had the usual family de-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 185 
 
 votions, Phebe, as was her custom, reading 
 a chapter and praying " out of her own 
 head," as Joan Latimer expressed it. Then 
 Faith locked the garden gate, and they all 
 went to bed.
 
 186 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 rPHOSE Japanese tea-cups were much 
 •*• upon the head-master's mind as he 
 sauntered home from his pleasant visit to 
 the Manor Farm cottage. 
 
 They took his thoughts back to a past 
 which he thought he had almost forgotten, 
 and upon which indeed he scarcely ever al- 
 lowed himself to dwell except when he felt 
 he was in danger of becoming a little puffed 
 up by the academical and scientific honours 
 which he was achieving. 
 
 Many years before, when he had just 
 come into his College fellowship, and was
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 187 
 
 considerably more under the influence of 
 female attractions than at the present time, 
 he had become acquainted with a very 
 pretty, fascinating young widow, who was 
 living with her brother, a clergyman in 
 Oxford, and who knew how to play her 
 cards very much better than he, buried in 
 natural history and scientific pursuits, was 
 at all likely to do. 
 
 Her husband had only been dead a year 
 or two. He was a young civilian in the 
 Bombay Presidency, and had left her some- 
 what slenderly provided for. When, after 
 his death, she decided to return to her 
 friends at home, she was very glad to sup- 
 plement her income by taking charge of a 
 little girl, eighteen months old. The 
 father of that little girl was Martin 
 Isel worth. His married life had been a 
 fairly happy one, cut short by the 
 death of his wife when the child was yet a
 
 188 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 mere baby. For a while he kept it with 
 him, but when Mrs. Maleveron, whose hus- 
 band's station was very near his own bun- 
 galow on the indigo estate, told him she 
 was coming home, he thought it was a good 
 opportunity of having the child placed 
 under English care. He would fain have 
 sent it to Callis Maplethorpe, who was still 
 his young ideal of faithful and dutiful 
 womanhood, but the calm sentences in 
 which she had requested that after the 
 breaking of their engagement there might be 
 no further communication between them, 
 prevented him from saying anything to her 
 about it ; and as Mrs. Maleveron intimated 
 her willingness, not only to take the child to 
 England, but to care for it as her own when 
 she was settled there, the little Callis was 
 given into her charge, an ample yearly re- 
 muneration having first been agreed upon, 
 and Mrs. Maleveron, who was a capital
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 189 
 
 business woman, notwithstanding her pretty, 
 soft, engaging ways, having ascertained that, 
 in case of Mr. Iselworth's death, there would 
 be a sufficient provision left for his orphan's 
 support. 
 
 He did die very soon, as we know already, 
 leaving guardians in India for the little girl, 
 but directing that, so long as Mrs. Maleveron 
 was able and willing to continue the charge, 
 she should not be removed from under her 
 care. A hundred and fifty pounds a year 
 was to be paid into her hands until Callis 
 reached the age of eighteen ; then the allow- 
 ance was to be increased until she came of 
 age, when, if she wished it, she was to return 
 to her guardians in India, or, if she chose to 
 remain in England, any of her father's pos- 
 sessions which remained in the care of the 
 trustees, and all properties which might 
 have accumulated during her minority, were 
 to be placed in her hands.
 
 190 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Mrs. Maleveron was rather relieved than 
 otherwise by the death of Mr. Iselworth, 
 since, so long as she chose to keep the child, 
 its hundred and fifty pounds a year would 
 afford an ample margin for profit, whilst yet 
 she remained at perfect liberty to transfer 
 her responsibility to other suitable persons, 
 should her own prospects ever brighten, by 
 the finger of Providence pointing in the di- 
 rection of a second husband. 
 
 Accordingly, when intelligence arrived of 
 Mr. Iselworth's death, she wrote to the 
 trustees, intimating her intention of bring- 
 ing up the little girl, to whom she had 
 given the name of Mopsie, and asking that 
 any little articles of plate, linen, &c, which 
 had been in daily use by him, might be sent 
 to her, as the constant sight of them would 
 tend to keep the memory of her father alive 
 in the child's heart. 
 
 The trustees, who were personal friends
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 191 
 
 of Mrs. Maleveron, thought the request was 
 very pretty and touching, and at the earliest 
 convenient opportunity they forwarded a 
 box, containing Mr. Iselworth's favourite set 
 of Japanese china — at least they were sorry 
 to say it was only half a set, the remaining 
 half not being forthcoming — his plate, and a 
 few Indian curiosities, which formed part of 
 his sitting-room furniture. 
 
 Those Japanese tea-cups were almost the 
 first things Martin Iselworth bought when 
 he landed in Bombay, and he sent the miss- 
 ing half of them to Callis Maplethorpe, by 
 the vessel which had brought him out to 
 India. 
 
 So little Mopsie was settled down with 
 Mrs. Maleveron and her brother, George 
 Randolf, in the old city of Oxford, and a 
 tolerably happy time the child had of it, 
 being left very much to herself, and only 
 scantily attended to as regarded the cultiva-
 
 192 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 tion of her intellect. Bunnie taught her to 
 read, and Mrs. Maleveron dressed her pret- 
 tily, and saw that she grew up with a proper 
 accent, and Mr. Randolf was very kind to 
 her, and when she was about five years 
 old a new interest came into her life which 
 promised to brighten it in no ordinary de- 
 gree. 
 
 For at that time it began to appear as if 
 the finger of Providence really were point- 
 ing in the direction of a second marriage for 
 Mrs. Maleveron. John Ducross, a college 
 chum of Mr. Randolf's, used frequently to 
 come over from his musty old den and 
 smoke a cigar with the clergyman, and tell 
 stories to the brown-haired little Mopsie, 
 who would sit on his knee by the hour to- 
 gether, gazing up into his face with big blue 
 eyes of wonder and delight. And — for he 
 was a great lover of children — he would 
 trot about with her all over the house, and
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 193 
 
 teach her to jump down one, two, three, 
 or four steps at a time, or let her slide com- 
 fortably, shielded in his strong arms, from 
 top to bottom of the broad oak banisters, 
 or make swings for her of ropes fastened 
 to the beams of the kitchen ceiling, or play 
 see-saw with her on a plank balanced on a 
 big stone ball which had once formed the fin- 
 ishing ornament of the garden gate. Indeed, 
 in those days John Ducross and little 
 Mopsie might be found almost every day 
 skirmishing about somewhere in St. Luke's 
 Vicarage house, and Mr. Randolf, a grave, 
 silent, abstracted man, who interested him- 
 self in few things outside his own parish, 
 said innocently enough one day to his sister, 
 that such a lover of children would be sure to 
 make a good husband, if only the right per- 
 son could be found for him. 
 
 Mrs. Maleveron thought so too, but she 
 went a little further, and thought that the 
 
 vol. i. o
 
 194 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 right person might be found not very far 
 away. She had made up her mind some 
 time before that a shy, studious, simple- 
 hearted man like the Fellow of Lincoln's, 
 with eligible prospects too — for there were 
 good livings in the gift of the College — 
 would be an excellent match for herself; 
 and perhaps, as he was a lover of children, 
 he would not object to Mopsie too, in which 
 case the hundred and fifty a year would 
 still afford a considerable margin of profit. 
 
 So Mrs. Maleveron acted accordingly. 
 There was always afternoon tea ready for Mr. 
 Ducross, served in those lovely little china 
 cups which were part of Mopsie's inheritance 
 from her father, and which, in common with 
 all the other pretty Indian things, Mrs. 
 Maleveron had in constant use, that being, 
 as she said before, the best way of keeping 
 its father's memory alive in the child's 
 heart ; and she had the daintiest suppers
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 195 
 
 prepared when he came across of an 
 evening to smoke a cigar with her brother, 
 and she got up a sudden interest in his 
 favourite pursuit of natural history, and 
 was continually begging in the sweetest 
 manner imaginable for information about 
 caddis worms, grubs, beetles, and other 
 live creatures which she found in the neigh- 
 bourhood of the Isis, and which formed such 
 a ready excuse for long tete-a-tetes with the 
 unsuspecting naturalist, who was of course 
 delighted to tell her everything he knew. 
 
 And then when she had imprisoned her 
 many-legged victims in George's empty 
 collar-boxes, with little holes cut to let the 
 air in, Mr. Ducross must come up at least 
 every second day to see how they were getting 
 on, and to condole with her if they died, 
 or ate each other up, or made their 
 escape, or did anything else which wound- 
 
 ed her tender heart. And he must bring 
 
 o2
 
 196 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 over his big volumes of Natural History 
 to show her the exquisite illustrations, 
 and he must sit very close to her to ex- 
 plain everything, for, as she confessed 
 over and over again, she was so stupid and 
 foolish, she wondered anyone so splendidly 
 clever as Mr. Ducross could ever have 
 patience with her. It was so good of him. 
 
 Mrs. Maleveron said this in the most art- 
 less manner possible, putting up her chin in 
 that pretty little way which had done more 
 than anything else to win the affections of 
 her first husband. And then, of course, as 
 a sequence upon the passion which he had 
 developed in her for Natural History, Mr. 
 Ducross must take her to the haunts of the 
 different creatures, show her the willow- 
 trees where at certain hours particular 
 moths were to be found, wait with her 
 there until the said moths made their appear- 
 ance, help her to capture them in a net, and
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 197 
 
 touch them with that delightful stuff which 
 killed them without any pain ; it was very 
 ridiculous of her, no doubt, but she really 
 could not bear to see anything suffer — what 
 about the crimped cod, Mrs. Maleveron, 
 that you ordered from your fishmonger 
 twice a week during the season ? But per- 
 haps, as you did not see that suffer, it was 
 of no consequence — and then he must come 
 home with her and show her how to arrange 
 them in a drawer with a glass top, and 
 write their names with her own little pearl- 
 handled pen above each specimen. 
 
 Of course all that sort of thing naturally 
 produces its own result by-and-by, and John 
 Ducross, innocent Fellow of Lincoln's that 
 he was, would scarcely have deserved the 
 name of a man if he had not sooner or later 
 yielded to the gentle treatment. He was 
 beginning to find out that Mrs. Maleveron 
 was one of the most delightful women he
 
 198 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 had ever known, and he was beginning to 
 wonder how it would feel to have a soft 
 voice like that always appealing to his supe- 
 rior wisdom, and a clinging, affectionate 
 nature always looking to him for guidance, 
 when the short vacation came, and he went 
 across into Wales to look for butterflies, 
 Mrs. Maleveron making him promise faith- 
 fully that he would write and tell her as 
 soon as ever he found anything that was 
 very beautiful. For her part, she told him, 
 putting up her chin more prettily than ever 
 as she said it, that she should miss him so 
 much — he had made her life ever so much 
 happier since she learned from him how to 
 find in the commonest objects of nature 
 marks of that skill and design which — &c, 
 &c. The rest was like the general prefaces 
 to Natural History manuals — in fact, Mrs. 
 Maleveron got it from one of them. 
 
 In due time John Ducross came back,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 199 
 
 having written to Mrs. Maleveron about a 
 butterfly, but received no answer. And his 
 first care, after he had unpacked his things, 
 was to present himself at St. Luke's Vicar- 
 age with a tin case full of hemerophila for 
 his pupil's collection in one pocket, and a 
 Jack-in-a-box for Mopsie in the other. 
 Mopsie was there ready to jump on his 
 knee and smother him with kisses, quite 
 irrespective of the Jack-in-a-box ; and Mr. 
 Kandolf was there, grave, quiet, absorbed as 
 usual, open chiefly to cigars and parochial 
 conversation ; and the Japanese tea-cups 
 were there on the little three-legged table, 
 with the comical old china pot — another of 
 Mopsie's possessions — sending out its steamy 
 fragrance as a hint of better things to come. 
 How kind of George's sister to have every- 
 thing in readiness for him, knowing that he 
 would take the very first opportunity of 
 coming to see her, and telling her how
 
 200 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 he had been thinking about her all the 
 time. 
 
 But Mrs. Maleveron was not there, and 
 they waited and waited, and Mr. Randolf, 
 fldgetting uneasily in his chair, said some- 
 thing about his sister being busy with some 
 one in the drawing-room ; and when at last 
 she did come, smiling with all the creamy 
 delightfulness of brunette beauty, there came 
 with her a bulky foreigner, all beard and 
 moustache and eyebrows, and for him now 
 Mrs. Maleveron put up her pretty little chin, 
 and for him she dropped her ivory white 
 eyelids; and as her dainty hands flitted 
 about amongst the tea-cups, John noticed 
 the flash of a new diamond upon them, and 
 when, after keeping up for a little while a 
 show of merriment with unconscious Mopsie, 
 who insisted upon finding out how the Jack- 
 in-a-box jumped in and out, he proposed 
 having a cigar with George in the study,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 201 
 
 George gave him the pleasing intelligence 
 that Mrs. Maleveron was " ensued." 
 
 He went out of the house, and never came 
 into it any more. Very foolish of him, of 
 course, for it only gave his lady-love the 
 chance of telling other people how deeply 
 the poor fellow's heart had been touched. 
 And indeed she had quite intended to marry 
 him, only Mr. Von Strengel turned up un- 
 expectedly, and when she found that he had 
 such a beautiful estate in Germany, and 
 connections at the Court, and all that sort 
 of thing, she thought it would give her a 
 more brilliant future than the beetle-loving 
 Fellow of Lincoln's, who, though all that 
 could be desired in the way of steadiness 
 and respectability, had neither estates nor 
 connections that were likely to do much for 
 her. 
 
 After that John Ducross became travel- 
 ling tutor to the son of a nobleman, and in
 
 202 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 due time one of the college livings fell to 
 his share, and there he stayed until he was 
 made head-master of the Saxelby Grammar 
 School, a post he had held now for seven or 
 eight years. In all that time he had heard 
 nothing of Mrs. Maleveron, or probably he 
 would have been startled at the information 
 that Mr. Von Strengel had dealt with her 
 after her own example, having heard of a 
 lady with ten thousand pounds, which was 
 more to his purpose than the fascinating 
 but undowered loveliness of the civilian's 
 widow. So Mrs. Maleveron lived with her 
 brother still, and kept his home, and saved 
 as much as she could for herself out of 
 Mopsie's hundred and fifty pounds a year. 
 
 But the habits which dated from that 
 episode in his life clung to him, and now 
 John Ducross was known by all his men 
 friends — women friends he had none, he 
 thanked Heaven — as the most inveterate
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 203 
 
 old bachelor they had ever come across ; 
 kind, cheery, genial as in the best of days, 
 to anyone who would drink a glass of good 
 beer or smoke a cheroot with him, but flee- 
 ing as from the plague the face of pretty 
 girl or dark-eyed widow who so much as 
 hinted to him that she cared for moths or 
 butterflies. 
 
 And that was why Miss Maplethorpe's 
 china was so much on his mind as he saun- 
 tered home from the Farm cottage ; for he 
 had never seen any like it since he looked 
 up from the funny little blue and red men 
 on Mopsie's tea-cups to see Mrs. Maleveron 
 come in with her new lover.
 
 204 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 TN spite, however, of his distrust of the 
 A- female sex generally, the head-master 
 did find his way back before long to Miss 
 Maplethorpe's cosy little best parlour, partly 
 perhaps to acknowledge the loan of the 
 umbrella, which Phebe received the very 
 next day with mingled feelings of relief 
 and regret — relief because it was once more 
 safe at home, and regret because the send- 
 ing of it back in that way, with such a 
 polite message of thanks, might imply that 
 Mr. Ducross did not intend to come again 
 himself — and partly, perhaps, to be really
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 205 
 
 satisfied about the china which, after all, 
 might not be exactly like that which he 
 remembered only too well in the days of 
 his intimacy at St. Luke's Vicarage. 
 
 But he really did look forward to another 
 chat with those quiet women who had given 
 him the pleasantest sense of social compan- 
 ionship he had known for a long time. 
 Doubtless one source of the pleasantness 
 was that, although knowing, as probably 
 everyone in Low Saxelby by this time did 
 know, his attainments in entomology, they 
 did not make the remotest attempt to intro- 
 duce the subject. And when, noticing some 
 beautiful beetles' wings on the peacock- 
 feather fans over the mantelpiece, he really 
 could not help saying a few words on his 
 favourite subject, Miss Maplethorpe, with a 
 frankness that was positively refreshing, said 
 that she considered all creatures with more 
 than four legs as her natural enemies, to be
 
 206 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 dealt with in the most summary way by 
 broom and duster. And though he had 
 accounted for his proximity to the cottage 
 that rainy afternoon by explaining that a 
 certain poplar-tree on the other side of the 
 brook which skirted their garden wall, was 
 the haunt of a peculiar species of moth, 
 Phebe, to whom he was addressing himself 
 just then, betrayed not the least interest in 
 the information, except to say that she 
 hoped it was not the kind of moth which 
 ate through furs and woollens. Such ignor- 
 ance concerning the habits of the Epione 
 ajnciaria, though it might call for manly 
 pity, was at least a proof that Miss Phebe's 
 leanings were not in the direction of 
 entomology. 
 
 " I wonder if he will come again," Phebe 
 had said many times to herself, and more 
 than once to her sister, during the week 
 that elapsed between his first and second
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 207 
 
 visits. " I made myself as sure as could be 
 that he would bring the umbrella home 
 himself." 
 
 " Perhaps he thought we might want it 
 before it was proper for him to call again," 
 suggested Callis, who had not been without 
 a little pang of disappointment when the 
 umbrella was returned next day by the 
 Grammar School porter. If that was to be 
 the end, it just touched her pride a little 
 that they had let him see so plainly into 
 their quiet home life, and that he had 
 availed himself of the privilege too with 
 such freedom. If he thought them be- 
 neath him, he had no right to have accepted 
 their hospitality in that way, even to the 
 small extent of tea and short-cakes. Callis 
 was very sensitive about their position in 
 Saxelby ; she knew that they were equal to 
 the best in all that makes true refinement, 
 and if ever anybody tried to patronise them,
 
 208 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 anyone at least of education, it was done 
 once, and no more. With the Atcherleys it 
 was different. She took them on their own 
 ground of ignorance and rough kind-heart- 
 edness — kind-heartedness at least so far as 
 Mrs. Atcherley was concerned, and never 
 thought of being offended by any of the 
 good woman's remarks on their poverty. 
 But with those who ought to have percep- 
 tion enough to know a lady when they saw 
 her, and yet did not know her, Callis 
 Maplethorpe was as proud as Lucifer. 
 
 "I believe he will come, though," said 
 Phebe, as she was dusting the things in the 
 best parlour two or three days after. " He 
 said something about wishing to know us 
 better, and he doesn't look like a man who 
 talks for the sake of it. He's just the sort 
 of person, Callis, I should like to do anything 
 for. If I thought he wanted a set of warm 
 socks knitting for this next winter, now, it
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 209 
 
 would be the greatest pleasure in the world 
 to do them for him. I don't believe he has 
 anyone to look after him properly. I took 
 notice of his socks whilst his boots were 
 drying at the kitchen fire, and they were 
 worn as thin as they could be at the heels 
 without getting quite into holes. Another 
 washing will do it, if the woman isn't 
 careful." 
 
 "I don't think," said Callis, drily, "the 
 acquaintance is sufficiently advanced for you 
 to offer to help him in that way." 
 
 "Perhaps not; but it's a great shame 
 the matron, or whatever she is, doesn't look 
 after him properly. I know if I had it to 
 do for him " 
 
 And Phebe gave just one little sigh as she 
 arranged the ornaments on the mantelpiece. 
 In a general way she lived peacefully and 
 contentedly enough on the mountain-top of 
 her religious devotedness, the clouds which 
 
 vol. i. p
 
 210 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 surrounded it parting only to show her 
 the glorious light on the far-off land of 
 Beulah, whose perfect rest she hoped one 
 day to reach. But now and again there 
 was a rift in the clouds on the other side, 
 and she looked down into the valley, with its 
 little homesteads lighted by a different love, 
 and equally burdened and blest with the 
 duties that had passed her by, and she 
 thought what life might have been if the 
 dreams of her early girlhood had come true, 
 and if she too might have stayed in the 
 valley, and never seen the Celestial City at 
 all. When the rift had closed up again, 
 she spoke of these thoughts as " temptations 
 of the enemy." She did not know that the 
 enemy was that gentle, womanly heart, with- 
 out which people could not have loved her 
 as they did. 
 
 That was in the middle of the week, after 
 John Ducross had been. On the Saturday
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 211 
 
 afternoon the sisters were again sitting at 
 their window. This time they were sprig- 
 ging net for the Broadminster shops. It 
 was becoming rather close work for Callis, 
 her eyes, at sixty-two, failing her a little, 
 even with spectacles, as she counted the tiny 
 honeycombing, in order to keep her leaves 
 at an equal distance. But they must keep 
 on making, or else what would become of 
 them in those days when they were no 
 longer able to lay by anything? There 
 were no almshouses for decayed gentle- 
 women in Saxelby, and civil list pensions 
 were not for such as them, however hardly 
 they had toiled, and however faithfully they 
 had used such talents as had been given 
 them to trade with. 
 
 " It was just this time last week when he 
 came," said Phebe, whose thoughts kept 
 hovering, like a bird round its nest, over 
 the one very pleasant thing which had 
 
 p 2
 
 212 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 happened in their ]ives for such a longtime. 
 
 "A little later," said Callis. " The 
 kitchen clock had just struck four when 
 Faith went to hirn with the umbrella." 
 
 A pause. Phebe began again, with an 
 interrogative assertion, 
 
 " There are some short-cakes, Callis, and 
 you put extra butter into them, didn't 
 you?" 
 
 " Yes ; how did you know ?" 
 
 "Faith told me, and she asked if the 
 gentleman was coming again. I believe she 
 will never forget walking up the garden 
 path whilst he held the umbrella over her 
 head. She said it made her feel just like a 
 lady." 
 
 " She must not on that account look 
 down upon Reuben," said Callis, with just a 
 twinkle of amusement in her deep-set eyes. 
 "But, Phebe, there is somebody coming 
 across the Abbey Close. It is Mr. Ducross."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 213 
 
 The two women dropped their work and 
 gazed intently until the head-master crossed 
 the road into the little lane opposite the 
 cottage. There could be no doubt now 
 that he was coming to call. 
 
 Callis began to wrap up the net. Phebe. 
 put her piece hastily on one side. 
 
 " I'll go and tell Faith," she said, " and 
 get out the tea-things, in case he should 
 stay." 
 
 But instead — she was very vexed with her- 
 self for not liking to say at once she was going 
 to do it — Phebe slipped upstairs and put on 
 a clean collar, and the black velvet head- 
 dress which she had made since the previous 
 Saturday, Callis telling her that she would 
 look so much nicer now if she began to 
 wear one. She thought she did look nicer, 
 as she stood before the looking-glass smooth- 
 ing the bands of soft grey hair over those 
 cheeks whose rosy tint, not quite faded
 
 214 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 even yet, was once the admiration of all the 
 chapel people. Phebe was a little short 
 of fifty, but it was strange how much comeli- 
 ness remained with her at that age. Doubt- 
 less her religion had a great deal to do with 
 it ; it kept her from fretting and worrying. 
 There is nothing like a heart at leisure from 
 itself for keeping a certain beauty in the 
 face out of which the freshness of youth has 
 long ago departed. 
 
 When she had made herself look as nice 
 as she could, she went to see after the tea- 
 things, and by that time Faith had ushered 
 Mr. Ducross into the best parlour, whither 
 Miss Maplethorpe went to greet him.
 
 215 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 TTOW little he thought, when he came 
 -"--*■ forward to shake hands with the 
 quiet old lady in her black alpaca dress and 
 neat cap borders, of all the innocent expecta- 
 tion and castle-building of which his visit 
 was the culmination. Still less, when Phebe 
 entered, pleasant in her middle-aged placid- 
 ity, with just a private touch of conscious- 
 ness that the new head-dress was becoming, 
 could he tell how often during the week 
 past she had imagined this hour to herself; 
 how, even when she had been saying her 
 prayers, or sitting in her quiet corner at
 
 216 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 chapel, or listening, apparently, to the ex- 
 periences of her sisters in the class-meeting, 
 she had found herself starting suddenly 
 from a reverie in which she had gone 
 through every particular of his first visit, 
 and pictured to herself what this second one 
 might be, if ever it came to pass; and 
 whether he would be just as pleasant as he 
 had been before, and whether, after that 
 second visit, which he really ought to pay 
 for politeness sake, everything would drop 
 through, and there would be nothing left to 
 look forward to. Quite a dull feeling of 
 emptiness had come over Phebe as she con- 
 templated this last possibility, and with that 
 she had roused herself from her reverie, 
 and prayed the Almighty to pardon her for 
 setting her affections on things below, and 
 she had tried very hard to take up the 
 thread of the minister's sermon, or to un- 
 derstand what Sister Latimer was saying
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 217 
 
 about the " exercises " through which her 
 soul had passed during the week ; but some- 
 how that pleasant little picture of what had 
 happened in the best parlour would come 
 back, and with it the hope that everything 
 would not quite drop through. And here 
 was Mr. Ducross, and she was shaking 
 hands with him, and he was actually telling 
 them both that all the week he had been 
 wanting to come and see them, only he had 
 had to prepare a paper for some scientific 
 meeting at Broad minster, and that had kept 
 him in his study during every scrap of time 
 that he could spare from the boys. How 
 like a dream it all was, Phebe thought. 
 
 But soon afterwards Faith, not at all 
 dream-like in her lilac print gown and clean 
 white apron, came in with the tea-tray, for 
 Mr. Ducross said he would like very much 
 to stay and taste those delicious short-cakes 
 again, if both the ladies were quite sure he
 
 218 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 was not inconveniencing them. And the 
 appearance of those comical little blue and 
 red cups gave him the opportunity of saying 
 what had been on his mind ever since he 
 saw them the previous Saturday. 
 
 " One doesn't often get hold of anything 
 so quaint as these," he said, when he had 
 satisfied himself that the pattern really was 
 the same, the side of the cup that he was 
 drinking from being occupied by the identi- 
 cal little long-eyed man with a black top- 
 knot, who was leering so impudently into 
 his face a dozen years ago, when the bulky 
 German entered with Mrs. Maleveron. " An 
 old chum of mine at Oxford had some like 
 them. You know people will give almost 
 any money for that sort of thing sometimes, 
 but I haven't a bit of taste for china my- 
 self." 
 
 " I don't think I have either," said Miss 
 Maplethorpe, who was not quite certain
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 219 
 
 what a " chum " meant, and so abstained 
 from referring to the first part of the sen- 
 tence. " We have had those a very, very 
 long time ; they were sent over to us from 
 India by a friend." 
 
 "Were they really? Randolf's came 
 from India too. They belonged to a little 
 girl who was taken care of by his sister. 
 What a comical little morsel she was, to be 
 sure ! She could tell you a different 
 story about every man and woman from 
 beginning to end of the whole half- 
 dozen." 
 
 "Why, Callis," said Phebe, "that is just 
 like what you told me about the little girl 
 who strayed into the garden ever so long 
 ago, and when you brought her in here she 
 said they had some cups just like these at 
 home, and she knew stories about them. 
 Dear me ! I had almost forgotten her." 
 
 " I hadn't, though," said Callis, a light of
 
 220 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 love and longing coming into her eyes. 
 " Poor little Mopsie ! I wonder what has 
 become of her ?" 
 
 " Mopsie, did you say ?" asked John 
 Ducross, giving another look at the man 
 with the top-knot, who seemed to be wink- 
 ing and leering at him as if he could tell 
 him all about everything. 
 
 li Yes, that was her name," and then Miss 
 Maplethorpe went through the whole story, 
 how Mopsie had strayed into the garden, 
 having been left by a nursemaid whom she 
 called Bunnie, and how a pretty lady with 
 a sweet voice and soft dark eyes had come to 
 look for her, and they had all gone away to 
 the station together. They had onty come 
 to Saxelby for the day. 
 
 " She was very pretty," said Phebe, inno- 
 cently, "but I don't think she was nice. 
 When she caught hold of the child's hand 
 to take her away, she gripped it so tight
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 221 
 
 that there was quite a red mark left, was 
 there not, Callis ?" 
 
 "Yes, there was. Poor little Mopsie ! 
 She asked me to tell her a story, and she 
 told me a very nice gentleman used to 
 come to the house sometimes who knew 
 all about Red Riding Hood, and the lady 
 who lived in a well, and the princess with 
 wings." 
 
 " It must be the very same," said John 
 Ducross, a queer look coming into his face 
 as he turned the cup round so that the little 
 man should not be able to leer at him any 
 more, " Dear me ! why, I've told her those 
 stories hundreds of times when I used to go 
 in and sit with Randolf of an afternoon. A 
 pretty little dot of a thing, with blue eyes 
 and a turn-up nose and such a mop of 
 frizzy brown hair. How that hair used to 
 plague " 
 
 Then Mr. Ducross stopped, and sent up
 
 222 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 his cup for some more tea. Then he con- 
 tinued — 
 
 " But, you know, Mopsie was not her 
 real name. I suppose they only called her 
 so because her hair was always so rough." 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Miss Maplethorpe. 
 " Callis was her proper name. I remember 
 it very well, because it's my name too." 
 
 " Ah ! then it really is the same. Callis ; 
 yes, that was it. More like the name of a 
 moth or a beetle, I used to think. But I 
 beg your pardon, Miss Maplethorpe ; I 
 forgot it was your name too." 
 
 " Oh ! never mind. 1 have had it too 
 long to be put out of love with it now. 
 But who was the little girl ? I have often 
 thought I should like to know something 
 about her. I suppose she was niece to the 
 lady and gentleman, for she called the lady 
 Tantie, and the gentleman Uncle George." 
 
 " No, they were no relations. She called
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 223 
 
 him Uncle George, did she? He wasn't a 
 German-looking gentleman with a big 
 moustache ? But how long ago did you 
 say it was P" 
 
 " Ten years this very summer. No, he 
 wasn't at all German-looking. He was a 
 clergyman, very grave and quiet, and Mopsie 
 said he never had any time to tell her 
 stories, because he was always getting his 
 preaching ready. Poor little thing! She 
 did look as if she wanted some one to be 
 good to her. But will you tell me about 
 her?" 
 
 " Oh ! there isn't much to tell. The 
 lady's name is Mrs. Maleveron ; at least, it 
 used to be." 
 
 " That was it," said Phebe ; " I remember 
 it as well as can be, now you say it again. 
 I saw it upon her pocket-handkerchief." 
 
 John Ducross looked puzzled. 
 
 "And you are sure the gentleman was
 
 224 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 not a German ? I mean a man with a very 
 big beard and moustache." 
 
 " I don't know," said Phebe, " whether 
 he was a German or not, but I'm sure he 
 hadn't a beard, had he, Callis ? He had 
 nothing at all of that sort, and he was a 
 clergyman, and he was not a foreigner, for 
 he spoke English just as well as I do." 
 
 11 And you are sure it was ten years ago, 
 not more than ten, not twelve or thirteen." 
 
 " No," said Phebe, not having the least 
 idea how the memories which she was re- 
 calling struck across those of the head- master. 
 "It was ten years ago last July, for Joan 
 Latimer has been in the almshouses exactly 
 nine years and a half, and she went in with 
 her broken leg the Christmas after Mopsie 
 came." 
 
 " But please tell us about Mopsie," urged 
 Callis, to whom all this argument about 
 times and nationalities was very uninteresting.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 225 
 
 " Was she an orphan, and how came she 
 to have such a beetle's name, as you call 
 it?" 
 
 "I beg your pardon very much," said 
 John, crumbling his short-cake rather nerv- 
 ously. Indeed, Phebe noticed that he had 
 been crumbling it instead of eating it for the 
 last ten minutes, and glad as she was to see 
 him, she could not help feeling just a little 
 regretful that Faith had not put a white 
 cloth on the table before spreading tea. If 
 the butter — and there was an extra quarter 
 of a pound in — should mark the table 
 cover which was sent them from India so 
 many years ago ! 
 
 " I'm very sorry," continued John, "that 
 I said anything about the beetle. I really 
 can't tell you how Mopsie got her name. I 
 only know that she had it, and I suppose 
 her god-fathers and god-mothers gave it to 
 her. Mrs. Maleveron's husband was a 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 civilian, somewhere up in the north-west of 
 India, and this little girl's father had an 
 indigo plantation not far away, and his name 
 was Isel worth. And Mr. Maleveron and 
 Mrs. Iselworth died nearly at the same 
 time, and as Mrs. Maleveron was coming 
 home to live with her brother, Mr. Iselworth 
 asked her to bring the little girl home too, 
 because it doesn't do, you know, to keep 
 children out in India. So Mrs. Maleveron 
 brought her, and then Mr. Iselworth died, 
 and she has had her ever since. That is all 
 I know about it." 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe, having remarked that 
 the room was very close, had gone to open 
 the casement, and w r as sitting now on the 
 broad, low window seat, looking out over 
 her mignonette beds. John Ducross went 
 on, 
 
 " There are trustees in India to take care
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 227 
 
 of the estate until she comes of age, and in 
 the meantime so much a year is paid for her 
 out of the property." 
 
 " Do you think Mrs. Maleveron was kind 
 to her ?" said Phebe, who now had to sus- 
 tain the chief part of the conversation. Of 
 course it was curious, but not very touching 
 to her, that Mopsie should be Martin Isel- 
 worth's child. She was too much of a 
 child at the time to know everything about 
 her sister's engagement, and thirty years 
 had taken it almost into forgetfulness so far 
 as she was concerned, Callis never mention- 
 ing it by any chance. "Do you know, I 
 always have had the idea that the poor 
 little thing was not very happy. When Mrs. 
 Maleveron called her ' my darling,' she quite 
 fired up, and said she was not anybody's 
 darling, and she wouldn't have said that to 
 anyone she loved." 
 
 Q2
 
 228 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 " I am sure I don't know," said John 
 Ducross, and he said no more about it. 
 
 Indeed after that he became rather silent, 
 and as Miss Maplethorpe, sitting there in the 
 window, was silent too, and Phebe never 
 had very much to say for herself, it became 
 rather embarrassing. At last, all the short- 
 cake being crumbled away, Mr. Ducross re- 
 membered that he had some of the boys' 
 examination papers to look over, and went 
 away, saying he hoped they should meet 
 again before long. 
 
 It was strange about Mrs. Maleveron, he 
 thought, as, with his hands in his pockets, 
 he strolled leisurely home to the Grammar 
 School. Was she, then, after all, not mar- 
 ried to the German ? But it was no con- 
 cern of his. Thank goodness, he had for- 
 gotten her long ago ; and now neither she 
 nor any of the rest of her kind were half 
 so interesting to him as a moth that had a
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 229 
 
 new description of spot on its wings, or that 
 missing specimen of Papilio Adonis which he 
 was hunting after to complete his collection 
 of the butterflies of England.
 
 230 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 " T'M very glad he came again," said 
 ■*- Phebe, half an hour later, when 
 Faith was weeding the back-garden, and the 
 two sisters were in the kitchen, washing up 
 those little Japanese cups and saucers which 
 already had a sort of historic interest attach- 
 ing to them. " I believe he enjoyed it, and 
 it was only a pity I said anything to him 
 about Mopsie's aunt not being kind to her. 
 That seemed to fidget him. He's that sort 
 of man, I'm sure, that can't bear any sort of 
 injustice to be done to anyone, and Mrs. 
 Maleveron was not kind to the child."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 231 
 
 " Very likely," said Callis, vaguely. 
 
 "And so nervous," continued Phebe. 
 " Did you notice how he crumbled his short- 
 cake, until there was scarcely a bit of it left? 
 Now if it had been you or I one could 
 have understood it, but for a man like him ! 
 However, it makes one feel more at home 
 with him, and as there isn't a spot of grease 
 left on the table-cloth, it doesn't signify. 
 But it did put me out to see him at first, and 
 so many years as we've had it in use. It 
 was very nice of him to say he hoped we 
 should see more of each other, wasn't it, 
 Callis ?" 
 
 "Yes, very, because he doesn't say things 
 for the sake of saying them." 
 
 And as Callis did not either, she was 
 silent after that. Only she handled more 
 carefully and lovingly than ever the china, 
 which had been Martin's present nearly 
 thirty years before. And when they were
 
 232 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 safely put away in the corner cupboard in 
 the best parlour, and Phebe had gone to 
 her usual evening devotional reading, she 
 went into the porch to sit alone and think. 
 
 The low yellow sunlight was slanting 
 down through the elm-tree at the corner of 
 the garden, and dropping from stem to stem 
 of the ivy which clasped round the moulder- 
 ing lintels, and then it rested on the mossy 
 step, where Martin Iselworth had been 
 standing when, in that one word, he told her 
 of his Jove. 
 
 Since they had lived at the Cottage, Miss 
 Maplethorpe had left the moss growing 
 over that stone, so that no other footprint 
 might touch where his had trod. And even 
 after she heard of his marriage, she still had 
 the same feeling about the place. It was 
 sacred to a memory always precious to her. 
 He had put her aside ; it was better so. 
 Whv should all his life be wrecked because
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 233 
 
 sorrow had come into her own ? But that 
 could not make her forget him ; that could 
 not alter the fact that the brightest light of 
 her life had come through him. Let him 
 forget ; she could remember for them both. 
 Now she found that he had not quite 
 forgotten. His love had been truer than 
 she thought. He had called his child by 
 her name — the name spoken so softly to 
 her as they stood in the porch amongst the 
 ivy leaves years and years before. The past 
 must have been pleasant to him, or he would 
 not in this way have cared to make it live 
 again before him day by day. That thought 
 took the last drop of bitterness out of her 
 remembrance of him. It was like a tender 
 sunset glow rising upon the grey afternoon 
 of a life that had not been what the world 
 calls brilliant. Now, whatever else came, 
 this could never come, that he to whom she 
 had given so much could let it all go by.
 
 234 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Martin Iselworth dead, the wife dead, 
 only the little child left. And from Mar- 
 tin's grave among the palm-trees, that little 
 child upon whom her name was called had 
 come to her and said — 
 
 " I wish that lady would love me." 
 Where was the little brown-haired waif 
 now, and would time and tide ever give 
 them to each other again ? Why not ? No 
 other thing could be so strange as that 
 meeting which had already " happened," as 
 people call it. Callis had not in all the 
 past thirty years of her life asked great 
 things for herself, and that Martin Isel- 
 worth's child should cross her path again 
 was the greatest thing that could happen to 
 her henceforth. Yet, as she sat there in 
 the porch, remembering all the past of love 
 and loss, and patience and faithfulness, it 
 seemed no longer a thing to be only 
 dreamed of, but the natural outcome of all
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 235 
 
 that had gone before, that one day the little 
 Mopsie, now surely a fair maiden, with 
 Martin's own eyes and smile, should come 
 back and look wistfully into her face, and 
 say again, and this time say it not in vain — 
 " I wish that lady would love me." 
 If Callis Maplethorpe said her prayers 
 that night with neither bended knees nor 
 clasped hands, they were none the less 
 prayers in His sight to whom the thought 
 of praise, not its outward form, is the sweet 
 and precious thing. 
 
 That was the beginning of many a pleas- 
 ant evening in which John Ducross came 
 over to see the sisters at the Manor Farm 
 cottage. 
 
 It would be hard to say whether he or 
 they enjoyed those evenings most, though if 
 it be more blessed to minister than to be 
 ministered unto, then Callis and Phebe had
 
 236 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 the Benjamin's portion. What a difference 
 his coming made to them ! He would have 
 smiled to himself had he known what a 
 new delight Callis had in preparing those 
 short-cakes, of which, since he had said how 
 delicious they were, there was always a 
 supply in her otherwise scantily-furnished 
 store closet ; and what pains she took in 
 going round all the Saxelby grocers' shops 
 to buy a quarter of a pound of a particular 
 kind of tea for his own special use. It was 
 the kind they always used to have in their 
 prosperous days in the old High Street 
 house, but poverty had long ago reduced 
 them to Mr. Battersby's four-and-sixpenny 
 mixture, and for a good thirty years they 
 had never tasted the flowery Pekoe of their 
 youth, until Callis, without saying anything 
 to her sister, gave up butter for a fortnight, 
 and with the savings bought that quarter of 
 a pound, to be carefully stored away in a
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 237 
 
 tin box, and only brought out when the 
 head-master came. 
 
 And he would scarcely have smiled, but, 
 good man that he was, an infinite feeling of 
 kindliness and pity would have come over 
 him had he known how many times Phebe 
 got up a couple of hours earlier and read 
 her customary chapter and said her prayers, 
 and got through her daily stint of little 
 domestic duties in order to finish her net- 
 sprigging by four in the afternoon, so that 
 if "our gentleman," as Faith always called 
 him, did come, there might be neither let 
 nor hindrance to the enjoyment of those 
 quiet evenings which she now counted upon 
 as much as on the outward means of grace 
 themselves. 
 
 Nay, sometimes she was afraid she was 
 beginning to count upon them even more 
 than upon the u outward means." Else 
 why, when five minutes sufficed to slip on
 
 238 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 her bonnet and shawl for chapel, should she 
 spend nearly half an hour in tidying herself 
 on those afternoons when Mr. Ducross 
 might possibly come? And why, middle- 
 aged woman that she was, should she, only 
 the day after his last visit, have spent full 
 twenty minutes before her glass trying 
 whether her grey hair would look better 
 brushed a little farther back from her fore- 
 head, after the manner of Mrs. Dibthorpe, 
 and whether a little lappet of black lace 
 drooping on each side from the home-made 
 black velvet head-dress would avail to hide 
 the sharpening line of that once so perfect 
 curve of cheek and ear, over which her 
 father used to pass his hand so lovingly in 
 the old times? 
 
 Was it vanity? And at her time of life 
 too ! Or was it a device of the enemy of 
 souls, who would make use of Mr. Ducross 
 to draw her away from her allegiance to
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 239 
 
 that Master to whom her more than all was 
 due? 
 
 Phebe fell on her knees there and then, 
 and prayed to be delivered from setting up 
 idols in her heart. And in the bitterness 
 of her repentance, she begged the Almighty 
 to take her blessings away, rather than let 
 them turn to curses by usurping His own 
 place in her affections ; and she asked of 
 Him that she' might be stripped of all 
 earthly comforts, if so, and so only, she 
 could become entirely His child. 
 
 It was the day after this solemn act of 
 self-renunciation that John Ducross, who 
 had promised to bring a book for Miss 
 Maplethorpe, failed to come, and Phebe 
 saw in this bitter disappointment — for very 
 bitter it was, and that showed her the 
 state of her heart — the Almighty's accept- 
 ance of her sacrifice. She had a solemn 
 sense of prayer heard and answered, of
 
 240 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 being the subject of special dealings on 
 God's part, and as she sat there in the best 
 parlour, waiting, waiting for the footstep 
 that never came, she said to herself — and the 
 sweetness of the words almost took the 
 sting of her pain away — 
 
 " Nearer, my God, to Thee, 
 
 Nearer to Thee ; 
 E'en though it be a cross 
 
 That raiseth me, 
 Still all my cry shall be, 
 Nearer, my God, to Thee, 
 
 Nearer to Thee !" 
 
 Callis, who had been watching and wait- 
 ing too, looked at it practically. 
 
 "Never mind," she said, " the short-cakes 
 will keep till next Saturday, if they're put 
 through the oven the day before. And 
 what a good thing I hadn't brewed the 
 tea." 
 
 " We had set our hearts too much upon 
 him," said Phebe. " It's providential."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 241 
 
 Afterwards, in the weekly class-meeting, 
 she spoke of that time as one of " sore 
 temptation and much conflict with the 
 enemy," but she was able to add that she 
 had "overcome through faith." The other 
 members were somewhat surprised, Sister 
 Maplethorpe's experience being almost in- 
 variably of mercy and loving-kindness ; but 
 as Joan Latimer, who also belonged to the 
 class-meeting, said, a change might be good 
 for her, and keep her from settling on her 
 lees. 
 
 So came and so passed away, none but 
 God and the holy angels knowing anything 
 about it, the fiercest struggle Phebe Maple- 
 thorpe ever had between her longings for 
 entire sanctification, and that sweet human 
 love which comes sooner or later, often un- 
 sought and unbidden, into most women's 
 lives. This time driven back, it never 
 disturbed her peace again. God was pitiful 
 
 VOL. I. R
 
 242 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 to the pure, gentle soul which tried to serve 
 Him so faithfully. Henceforth Phebe was 
 able to give John Ducross a quiet, elder- 
 sisterly sort of kindness, which he took as 
 men do take such kindness, scarcely know- 
 ing how much it blessed his life ; and the 
 giving was full to her of that content which 
 comes most generously when asked the 
 least. And, as she said to herself, when the 
 bitterness of that death was passed, and she 
 could look up with tear-washed eyes into the 
 face of her Father asrain — 
 
 o 
 
 " What to Thee, oh, Lord ! we give, 
 A thousandfold we here obtain ; 
 And soon with Thee shall all receive, 
 And loss shall be eternal gain."
 
 243 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 f)Y the time the winter snows had 
 -*-^ whitened the lavender-hedge by the 
 cottage garden, Faith and Reuben, with 
 Miss Maplethorpe's full consent, had settled 
 matters between them, the half-hours so 
 frequently spent towards the end of autumn 
 in sweeping up leaves in the front walks 
 doubtless having contributed in no small 
 degree to such a satisfactory result. Reuben 
 came regularly once a week and had a com- 
 fortable cup of tea with his lady-love in the 
 kitchen, leaving punctually at half-past 
 eight, the time appointed by Miss Maple- 
 
 r2
 
 244 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 thorpe. Reuben was getting decent wages 
 now, as foreman to Mr. Atcherley's miller 
 on the Busselport road, and he often men- 
 tioned to Faith some nice little cottage or 
 other which he had seen, near to the mill, 
 and which he thought would do very well 
 for them to settle in ; but Faith had turned 
 a deaf ear hitherto to all such overtures. 
 She had no notion of settling yet, she said, 
 and she would toss up her chin so prettily 
 as she said it. She was as comfortable as 
 comfortable could be with the Miss Maple- 
 thorpes, and she didn't mean to leave until 
 she had laid by enough to buy a bit of 
 carpet for the front kitchen, and a chest of 
 drawers with a lock, and " a fairish lot o T 
 things," meaning by that a trousseau to put 
 in them. 
 
 Reuben always endeavoured to obtain a 
 kiss when Faith tossed her chin in that way. 
 It made her look so pretty. Indeed it was
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 245 
 
 something like Mrs. Maleveron's own pet 
 accomplishment, due allowance being made 
 for difference of station in the perfection 
 attained. Only Faith's toss was a means of 
 self-defence against the assiduities of those 
 who were too anxious for a settlement, 
 whilst that exquisite little upward push of 
 the Maleveron chin was intended to provoke 
 admiration to the proposing point. Reuben 
 got the kiss twice out of three times, but 
 he never got Faith to say when the wedding 
 should take place. 
 
 By that time, too — the time of snow on 
 the lavender-hedge — it had come to be an 
 understood thing that on Saturday after- 
 noons the head-master of the Grammar 
 School should come across and sit for an 
 hour or two in the cosy little best parlour, 
 where he now felt completely at home, and 
 where Phebe, too, had learned to feel com- 
 pletely at home with him, the faintest touch
 
 246 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 of anything which could be construed into 
 the ; ' setting up of idols " never now vexing 
 her quiet spirit. When it was quite settled 
 that he really could stay for a cup of tea, 
 but not till then, Miss Maplethorpe used to 
 slip out and brew the flowery Pekoe in a 
 little pot which held two cupfuls. They 
 had their own four and sixpenny mixture as 
 usual in another pot, accounting for it to 
 unsuspicious Mr. Ducross by the fact that 
 Pekoe kept them awake of nights. Perhaps 
 the choicest pleasure in all their lives was- 
 giving him that cup of tea. It was a pleas- 
 ure only possible to those whose outward 
 position has sunk almost to the vanishing 
 point of fashionable respectability, and to 
 Callis at least the pleasure gained a little 
 spice from the feeling of their being able to 
 hide it from him so cleverly. Phebe had 
 been somewhat exercised at first by doubts 
 as to the morality of the proceeding, but
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 247 
 
 Callis boldly said that she believed Mary 
 and Martha would have done just the same 
 had tea found its way into the family of 
 Bethany. The essence of hospitality, she 
 said, was to give your friends the best you 
 could, but never to let them see that there 
 was any effort in the giving of it. 
 
 Sometimes at these little teas she used to 
 get Mr. Ducross to talk about Mopsie. It 
 was so pleasant to her to hear of the child, 
 to gather up, as she could now and then, 
 traits of character which reminded her of 
 Martin. To her disappointment, Mr. Du- 
 cross never seemed anxious to prolong the 
 conversation when it got upon this subject, 
 though he professed himself a great lover 
 of children, and of Mopsie in particular. She 
 found out from him that Mr. Randolf had 
 left Oxford, and was living now in a little 
 parish down in the south, of which he was 
 rector. If the Indian arrangement still held
 
 248 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 good, Mopsie, now a girl of seventeen or 
 eighteen, would still be with them, as she 
 w T as not to return to her guardians until she 
 came of age, and even then not unless she 
 wished it. 
 
 After that Miss Maplethorpe went to the 
 station, and looked up and down the time- 
 tables for the name of Chalford, the Dorset- 
 shire village of which Mr. Randolf was 
 rector. She could not find it anywhere, 
 and neither Mr. Ducross nor the railway 
 men could tell her the name of the nearest 
 station. She did, however, find out that it 
 could not be less than two hundred and 
 seventy miles away, and to travel there and 
 back, even to get a glimpse of Martin's 
 child, would cost more than could be earned 
 in many and many a month, over and above 
 the money which was absolutely necessary 
 to keep the little household going. If Mr. 
 Atcherley would but have given her the
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 249 
 
 price of the champagne that he drank at one 
 dinner. But Mr. Atcherley was not a man 
 to do kindnesses of that sort, even if Miss 
 Maplethorpe had been the woman to ask him 
 for them. 
 
 Neither could she pray, as some people 
 better than herself would doubtless have 
 done, that the course of events might be 
 so ordered that her own providential path 
 and that of the child, after whom she so 
 greatly longed, might some day cross, that 
 in God's own way — she would leave so much 
 to Him as that—He would give them to each 
 other again, and so fulfil the wish of her 
 heart. For Miss Maplethorpe believed that, 
 whether she interfered with it or not, the 
 course of events was already ordered by a 
 wisdom wiser than her own, and that if she 
 never saw the child more, sucli disappoint- 
 ment would be quite as " providential," quite 
 as much God's doing, as though they should
 
 250 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 stumble over each other in the market-place 
 the day after to-morrow. She could but 
 wait and hope, and be patient, doing 
 her little work of housekeeping and net- 
 sprigging, and comforting those who were 
 worse off than herself, with such faithfulness 
 that, whatever else failed her, a conscience 
 void of offence should never fail. Then let 
 God give or keep back what she had come 
 to think of now as the one beautiful possibility 
 of her life, it would still be well ; that life 
 consisting not in what it possessed, but in 
 what it could become. 
 
 And then she turned to her favourite 
 Thomas a Kempis, and read — 
 
 " What canst thou see anywhere that can 
 long continue under the sun ? 
 
 " Thou thinkest perchance to satisfy thy- 
 self, but thou canst never attain it. 
 
 " Why art thou troubled when things 
 succeed not as thou desirest? For who is
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 251 
 
 he that hath all things according to his 
 mind ? Neither I nor thou, nor any man 
 upon earth. 
 
 " He that knoweth best how to suffer 
 will best keep himself in peace. That man 
 is conqueror of himself and lord of the 
 world, the friend of Christ, and an heir of 
 heaven. 
 
 " Some time or other thou must be sepa- 
 rated from all, whether thou wilt or not. 
 
 " For the way of man is not always in 
 his power, but it belongeth unto God to 
 give and to comfort when He will, and how 
 much He will, and whom He will, as it shall 
 please Him, and no more." 
 
 And it seemed to her then that to be 
 content to work and wait was all.
 
 252 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 TN those days it fell out that Mr. Borrow- 
 *- mont, the vicar of Low Saxelby, was 
 offered the living of Arlesfield-curn-Marches- 
 bank, a small country parish near the Cathe- 
 dral town of Liddelham. The living was 
 not worth quite so much as that of Low 
 Saxelby, but, as regarded preferment, it was 
 a step upwards, a prebendary stall in Lid- 
 delham Minster having gone with it for 
 many years past, and Mr. Borrowmont, if he 
 took the living, would have the offer of the 
 stall too. 
 
 He accepted both. During the last thirty
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 253 
 
 years Saxelby had become so restlessly pro- 
 gressive, so fidgety in all matters connected 
 with politics, sanitation, church, commerce, 
 and education, that it was no longer a com- 
 fortable place for a man who liked to take 
 things easily. When he entered upon the 
 living, he was what is, or rather what was 
 then called, a moderate High Churchman ; 
 that is, he liked the services to be well con- 
 ducted, he let his curates have as many as 
 they liked, he visited the people regularly, 
 was particular about catechising, prepared a 
 new sermon once a week, and thought a 
 great deal about the efficiency of his schools. 
 But that was all consistent with sitting down 
 to a comfortable dinner every evening of 
 his life, and having a leisurely glass or two 
 of port wine after it, and a still more lei- 
 surely cigar or two in the study, whilst Mrs. 
 Borrowmont dozed or netted by the drawing- 
 room fire. And if thimrs could have gone
 
 254 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 on in that way, he would probably never 
 have accepted the living of Arlesfield-cum- 
 Marchesbank, even though half-a-dozen 
 prebendal stalls had gone with it. 
 
 But owing to the intolerable fussiness and 
 energy of those Busselport merchants, who 
 began to infest Low Saxelby as soon as the 
 railroad was completed, things could not go 
 on in that wa}\ The vicar must be on the 
 committee of everything that was set a- 
 going — Day Schools, Night Schools, High 
 Schools, Art Schools, Libraries, Mechanics' 
 Institutes, Mutual Improvement Societies, 
 and what not, until it became almost next 
 to impossible for him to get a dinner at all, 
 to say nothing of a glass of port or a cheroot 
 after it. And as if sitting on committees 
 was not enough, and giving that fine, hand- 
 some, aristocratic countenance of his to any- 
 thing that was said, he must begin to have 
 his own opinions on every question that was
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 255 
 
 brought up for discussion, and instead of 
 saying just a few kindly, courteous words 
 about the pleasure he felt in helping for- 
 ward any good work amongst his parish- 
 ioners, and the opportunities which such 
 meetings afforded of bringing together 
 those whom social position might otherwise 
 have kept apart, and general remarks of 
 that kind, which could be jotted down in 
 his note-book and made use of over and 
 over again as circumstances required, he 
 was expected now to go into the subject 
 and say something that had regularly been 
 got up for the occasion. And those inde- 
 fatigable Busselport merchants, if once he 
 promised to give his attention to anything 
 they brought before him, had such an 
 inconvenient way of sending him whole 
 wheelbarrows full of reports, blue books, 
 statements, official information, digests, 
 epitomes, and abstracts of that particular
 
 256 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 thing, with a request that he would have 
 the goodness specially to notice such and 
 such a point, and give them the benefit of 
 his opinion upon it when the committee sat 
 next. It was really more than he could 
 bear. A man had need to carry the whole 
 British Encyclopedia about in his brain to 
 do justice to what was required of him as 
 Vicar of Saxelby. 
 
 So Mr. Borrowmont hinted to the Bishop 
 of Broad minster that he thought a younger 
 clergyman might do better for the place, 
 and the Bishop of Broadminster wrote to 
 the Bishop of Liddelham, in the Midland 
 counties, and the Bishop of Liddelham 
 wrote to Sir Barrington Martindale, in 
 whose gift was the living of Arlesfield-cum- 
 Marchesbank, and Sir Barrington wrote to 
 Mr. Borrowmont, saying to him that if 
 Arlesfield would be acceptable to him as a 
 comparative retirement after the much toil
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 257 
 
 and responsibility of Low Saxelby, he should 
 have much pleasure in placing it at his 
 disposal. 
 
 The poor people were very sorry to lose 
 him. He always got on best with people 
 between whom and himself there was fixed 
 an indisputable gulf of position. He could 
 shake hands with anyone across that gulf, 
 and greet them with the cheeriest of words, 
 but it must be distinctly understood that 
 there was a gulf, not merely a little rising 
 and sinking of the ground which might be 
 construed by the over-liberalism of the day 
 into something so near absolute equality as 
 to be levelled by a few cart-loads of the 
 rubbish of night-schools, institutes, and free 
 libraries being judiciously disposed upon it. 
 He had had many a chat in the old times 
 with the big, burly bargemen as they lolled 
 on the wharves in the sunshine of the river 
 traffic days, smoking their pipes beside the 
 
 vol. i. s
 
 258 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 huge tarpaulin-covered heaps of corn-sacks, 
 or betting with each other which of their 
 boats would reach Busselport soonest when 
 they slipped their moorings with the tide 
 next morning. He never said anything 
 unpleasant about the betting, because there 
 were members of his own family, with 
 whom he was on the best of possible terms, 
 who laid much larger sums on the Derby 
 and Oaks; nay, he sometimes took so much 
 interest in it as to ask them kindly next 
 week which vessel really did win, and hav- 
 ing chatted with them a little time about it, 
 he would begin to inquire after their wives 
 and bairns, and give them a word or two of 
 friendly advice about bringing their earn- 
 ings home, and so forth. A downright 
 good man, they said,, and never bothered 
 one about going to church " reglar," as the 
 curates did, if they happened to go across 
 the wharves of an afternoon.
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 259 
 
 Then the six old women who lived in 
 Queen Elizabeth's almshouse, on the north 
 side of the tithe barn, had always a good 
 word to say for him. He was so " nice and 
 free," as they put it, and seemed to under- 
 stand " rheumatiz and all that sort of thing " 
 as well as the very parish doctor himself, 
 remembering exactly which particular joint 
 it was that had been affected on his previous 
 visit, and what means had been used for 
 alleviation ; never condoling with Betsey 
 Rankin about the pain in her left shoulder, 
 when, if he had given it a thousht, he might 
 have remembered that it was Martha Mason 
 who had the pain there, whilst Betsey was 
 that tormented in both her knees that 
 brandy and salt was not a thing to mention 
 for it, nothing but the thickest of flannel 
 dipped in sweet oil, and a cup of tea as good 
 as could be made, taken night and morning. 
 
 Leastways that was what the doctor re- 
 
 s2
 
 260 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 commended, though only Providence knew 
 where she was to get tea as good as could 
 be made, with half-a-crown a week, and 
 "vittles" the price they were since that nasty 
 railway had come into the place. 
 
 Thereupon Mr. Borrowmont, who had a 
 snug little private income in addition to his 
 living, would slip a shilling or two into the 
 old woman's hand, or perhaps go himself to 
 the nearest grocer's shop and buy a couple 
 of pounds of four-and-sixpenny, done up 
 into six separate parcels, one for each of 
 the old women, so that there might be no 
 heart-burning amongst them, a disease quite 
 as common in the almshouse, when gifts 
 were not equally distributed, as rheumatism 
 or " a sinking feel towards night." 
 
 And then what a smile he had for them, 
 always the same let the weather be what 
 it might. The terms of Queen Elizabeth's 
 charter provided that all the six old women
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 261 
 
 should go to church every Sunday, and they 
 sat in a pew just under the pulpit, so that 
 they need not go to sleep for want of 
 being able to hear ; but Martha Mason was 
 wont to say that a smile from Mr. Borrow- 
 mont on a week day was worth half-a-dozen 
 of his sermons on a Sunday, meaning doubt- 
 less thereby, for she was not a woman to 
 say anything disrespectful to the church, 
 that the smile was all for herself, whilst of 
 the sermon, even had it been exclusively 
 addressed to the almsfolk, she could at most 
 claim only a sixth. At least that was the 
 way the. good vicar got over it, when 
 Martha having made the above remark to 
 him, became aware, from the nudges and 
 black looks of the other women, that she 
 had violated the command of the catechism 
 as to reverent behaviour to one's spiritual 
 pastors and masters. 
 
 Mrs. Borrowmont was not so much
 
 262 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 approved of in the parish. As the saying 
 went, she " enjoyed poor health," which 
 was a sufficient excuse for not visiting the 
 humbler parishioners, whilst socially she 
 held herself quite aloof from even the 
 professional classes, only making a call upon 
 them once a year, and declining any at- 
 tempts on their part at hospitality. Indeed, 
 being second cousin to the Honourable Mrs. 
 Boverley-Carroll, of the Manor House, 
 such a condescension was scarcely to be 
 expected from her, though the Busselport 
 settlers said that in their part of the world 
 the clergyman's wife never held up her 
 head in that way, and did not take it at all 
 amiss if little presents of fruit or butter, or 
 even more substantial things found their 
 way to the parsonage. How could anyone 
 fancy Mrs. Borrowmont receiving fruit and 
 butter from the parishioners, or even a 
 bunch of roses ? One would as soon think
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 263 
 
 of sending them to the Manor House itself. 
 But in other ways, too, she had alienated 
 the affections of the place. The excessive 
 plainness of her dress, both at church and 
 elsewhere, was not what they could have 
 wished. No one could say she had not a 
 style of her own, but for any appearance 
 her bonnets made, they might have come 
 out of the meeting-house in Saxelby back 
 street, and that was not what the ladies who 
 attended so regularly at the Abbey church 
 had a right to expect. In the absence of a 
 distinctively noble head of the parish — the 
 Honourable Mrs. Boverley-Carroll and her 
 husband always worshipping in the little 
 church which they had built for the Man-* 
 nersby almsfolk — the Abbey church congre- 
 gation naturally looked to the vicar's lady 
 as a guide in matters of fashion, especially 
 when she went to London regularly for a 
 couple of months during the season ; and
 
 264 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 therefore they had a consciousness of not 
 being treated with proper respect when Mrs. 
 Borrowmont made her appearance Sunday- 
 after Sunday in a plain Dunstable, which, 
 however good it might be of its sort — and 
 even Mrs. Atcherley could not deny it was 
 " that soft" you might put it in your pocket, 
 and bring it out again none the worse — 
 had clearly never seen the light as regarded 
 trimming in any Bond Street milliner's shop 
 within the last ten years. 
 
 But that was Mrs. Borrowmont's way. She 
 never made herself one with the people, she 
 never even tried to help them in any way, 
 never made them feel that she had any 
 interest in their plans, or pleasures, or pur- 
 suits. That she had beautiful dresses, if she 
 only chose to put them on, there could be 
 no doubt, else how could she make her 
 appearance, as the Saxelby Chronicle said she 
 did, along with the rest of the county people,
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 265 
 
 at the Honourable Mrs. Boverley-Carroll's 
 state dinner-parties, and the Bishop's " at 
 homes," and the hunt balls at Broadminster, 
 and the private dances at the county seats in 
 the neighbourhood? No; Mrs. Borrowmont 
 was never cut out for a clergyman's wife, 
 and if a testimonial was got up for the dear 
 old vicar before he went away to that place 
 in the Midland Counties, she would not draw 
 any money out of the people's pockets to 
 swell the subscription lists. 
 
 That was what the ladies of Low Saxelby 
 said when it was first whispered that the 
 Reverend Mr. Borrowmont had accepted the 
 living of Arlesfield-cum-Marchesbank, with 
 its prebendal stall in Liddelham Minster.
 
 _ 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 TT was impossible to live as the Miss 
 ■*• Maplethorpes did, even on the extrem- 
 est fringe of society, without :aking some 
 little interest in the removal of the vicar of 
 the parish, and the rumours which floa 
 about concerning his successor. But perhaps 
 few people to whom he had mentioned the 
 matter at all seemed I bout it 
 
 than those two maiden ladies, when John 
 Ducross, coming in as usual for hi- S ~ lay 
 afternoon chat, told them of the impending 
 change. He could only tell them that 
 there was to be a change, for the Bishop, so
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 267 
 
 far, had kept his intentions, if he had any, 
 entirely to himself, and even Mr. Borrow- 
 mont could honestly say that he had not the 
 shadow of an idea who would be appointed 
 in his place. 
 
 Callis was somewhat independent, at 
 least for those days, in matters ecclesiastical. 
 She did not say much about it, but she had 
 said enough for Mr. Borrowmont, who was 
 not a conceited man, to find out that she 
 knew as much about religion as he could teach 
 her. He might be able to put the skeleton 
 of theology together a little more deftly 
 perhaps than herself, having an unusually 
 large acquaintance with what is called 
 patristic literature ; but as for that living 
 morality and spirituality which covers these 
 dry bones and turns them into a thinking, 
 breathing, moving influence, Callis needed 
 no help of his. Hers was a life whose 
 springs were fed from within rather than
 
 268 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 without. She was content to worship after 
 the manner of her forefathers, finding ex- 
 pression enough, when she needed to ex- 
 press them publicly, for her own aspirations 
 and longings in the good old prayers which 
 they had used. As for sermons, the} r might 
 pro fie her or they might not. If they did, 
 she was not slow to own the profit. If they 
 did not, she was quiet about it, the new- 
 fashion of ridicule, scorn, pity, or wonder 
 applied to everything which fails to square 
 with one's own ideas of progress, having not 
 yet commended itself to her common sense. 
 As for Miss Phebe, in her own mild, 
 gentle way she mistrusted the Established 
 Church as " formal," and was wont to in- 
 quire concerning a clergyman within its pale 
 — "Is he serious?" a question she would 
 have considered wholly irrelevant if applied 
 to a minister of her own denomination. 
 She had once or twice heard Mr. Borrow-
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 269 
 
 mont preach, for he was a man she admired 
 very much on account of his kindness to the 
 poor, but his sermons were not what she 
 called " saving," nor could she find any 
 profit in prayers which seemed to her only 
 vain repetitions. 
 
 Probably if Phebe had spoken the inmost 
 thought of her heart, she would have said 
 that little spiritual good was done in Saxelby 
 save that which had its origin in the Primi- 
 tive Methodist chapel, with perhaps an ex- 
 ception in favour of the Plymouth Brethren, 
 who had a place of worship in the next 
 street, and whose simple unworldly ways 
 commended them much to her. Still she 
 was a good Christian woman, and so instead 
 of rejoicing, as some of her fellow-members 
 did, over the shortcomings of the Church of 
 England, she mourned secretly over them, 
 and prayed that it might be gathered into 
 the true fold at last.
 
 270 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 Thus, when John Ducross told them Mr. 
 Borrowmont was leaving, they did not care 
 very much about it. Nor, when Millicent 
 and Selina Atcherley came a few days later, 
 to tell them the same story, and to add that 
 their papa, who was one of the churchwar- 
 dens, had heard that a quite different man, 
 remarkably active in parochial work, was 
 coming in his place, did that intelligence 
 affect them very much. Phebe looked 
 mildly out to where her snowdrops and 
 crocuses were budding above the February 
 snows, and said — 
 
 " I hope he is a converted man and a 
 true Christian. If he is, it will be all 
 right." 
 
 And then she proceeded to ask after Mrs. 
 Atcherley's guinea fowls. 
 
 " Oh, they're doing very nicely this season, 
 thank you, she managed to keep nearly all 
 of them through the cold weather. She
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 271 
 
 says when they begin to lay, if you would 
 like some she wouldn't mind giving you a 
 setting, or you can have Cochin China, if you 
 like. I would have Cochin China if I was 
 you, for of course, never having company, 
 what use are guinea fowls to you, and I 
 told ma so. Now Cochin China will save 
 you ever so much in meat, and their eggs 
 are big enough to make a breakfast off. Pa 
 says he wonders you have never taken to 
 keeping poultry, and especially now that 
 flour is rising so." 
 
 At this point, Phebe began to wish she 
 had not mentioned the guinea fowls, but 
 Selina, who had intelligent notions of 
 economy for people not so well off as her- 
 self, went on complacently — 
 
 " They say we shall soon have it double the 
 price, and then I'm sure I don't know what 
 the poor will do, but 1 know eggs are very 
 profitable. Ma says next year she'll turn
 
 272 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 over all the poultry to me, and I shall sell 
 the eggs at Busselport. You can always 
 get a penny a dozen for them there more 
 than you can here, and if you have plenty, 
 the carriage pays itself in no time. And 
 the Cochin Chinas are such good layers." 
 
 Selina might have gone on for some 
 time in this strain, but Millicent, who had 
 ends of her own to serve in making this 
 call upon the Miss Maplethorpes, thought 
 it was time now to put in her own end of 
 the wedge. 
 
 "Selina," she said, impatiently, "how 
 can you go on in that way ? One might 
 think we were in the small grocery line, to 
 hear you talk. Miss Phebe, I wouldn't take 
 to eggs at all if I were you, because, unless 
 you have plenty of servants, it is no end of 
 trouble to get them properly attended to. 
 Of course we leave it entirely to the poultry 
 bov."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 273 
 
 " Yes, and lose about a dozen eggs a 
 day," put in Selina, "because he steals thetn. 
 When ma gives it over to me, I shall look 
 after everything myself, so as to get a 
 profit," 
 
 From which it may be inferred that 
 Selina had the real Atcherley blood in her. 
 Millicent took no notice. 
 
 " Miss Maplethorpe, have you seen Mr. 
 Ducross lately? They've got it all about 
 that he has taken you up wonderfully. 
 Old Mrs. Quigley was telling Mrs. Dibthorpe 
 that scarcely a Saturday passes without his 
 coming over, and Mrs. Dibthorpe says it's 
 because he's taking views of the interior. 
 You know he does paint in water-colours. 
 Papa says it's a pity you don't charge, if 
 that's what he comes for, but I daresay he 
 is very pleasant at the same time." 
 
 " Yes," said Miss Maplethorpe, not with- 
 out inward amusement at the idea of taking 
 
 VOL. I. t
 
 274 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 half-crowns in payment for those pleasant 
 afternoons which she now looked forward 
 to as the best and brightest of all the week ; 
 but she did not go any farther in the way 
 of enlightenment. And if Mrs. Dibthorpe, 
 or anyone else, chose to think that John 
 Ducross spent his Saturday afternoons in 
 sketching the interior of the cottage, well, by 
 all means let them think so. It would hurt 
 nobody. 
 
 "He can make himself exceedingly agree- 
 able," said Millicent, patronizingly. " We 
 have met him occasionally in society, and 
 his conversation is most interesting. Pa 
 likes him very much ; indeed, he intends to 
 ask him to dine with us. Burrowby is com- 
 ing home for his furlough in March, and we 
 should like to make Mr. Ducross feel that 
 he can come to us whenever he likes then. 
 You know, it will be such a treat to him to 
 see Burrowby's collection of butterflies and
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 275 
 
 things. They have such beautiful ones in 
 India, and Mr. Ducross has a perfect passion 
 for them. I expect he and Burrowby will 
 get on remarkably well together." 
 
 Millicent was coming now to the real 
 purpose of her visit. She knew very well 
 that Mr. Ducross did not come to the cottage 
 for the purpose of sketching its interior, she 
 had found out as much as that from Faith, 
 whom she did not hesitate to " pump " when 
 there was any reason for doing so. Faith 
 had been down to the house a few weeks 
 before, to return a batch of the papers and 
 books which Mr. Atcherley had lent her 
 mistress ; and Millicent, who happened to be 
 strolling through the kitchen garden, had 
 taken the opportunity of getting a little 
 information out of her, keeping her there 
 for a quarter of an hour under the pretext 
 of gathering Miss Phebe a bunch of the 
 pot-herbs she was so fond of. Millicent 
 
 t2
 
 276 THE LAST OF HEK LINE. 
 
 insisted upon gathering the herbs with her 
 own hands, though the gardener was there 
 levelling the cabbage and celery beds ; and 
 Faith, being much impressed by this mani- 
 festation of Miss Atcherley's kindness, was 
 delighted to give the information which the 
 young lady asked for in the most careless, 
 off-hand manner possible, as she stooped 
 over the fragrant patches of sage and thyme 
 and marjoram which were peeping out 
 young and green after the winter frosts. 
 
 Yes, Mr. Ducross did come very often 
 indeed, and he always stayed tea, and the 
 little cups and saucers which they had in 
 Mr. Maplethorpe's time were used. Miss 
 Phebe dusted them herself every Saturday 
 afternoon, to be ready against he came. 
 And no, she was quite sure he never spent 
 his time taking a picture of the place, nor 
 anything of the sort ; for if ever she had 
 to £0 into the room to fetch out the tea-
 
 THE LAST OF KER LINE. 277 
 
 things, or feed the fire, or put fresh water 
 into the pot, he was always sitting as 
 comfortably as could be, just as if the 
 place was his own. And Miss Maple- 
 thorpe used to open the front door for him 
 herself, and once when he was going out, 
 he said it was just like home to him to come 
 and see them, he never enjoyed going any- 
 where else half so much. 
 
 " Oh ! and he is a kind gentleman, 
 ma'am," continued Faith, who gave her 
 evidence with the most innocent cheerful- 
 ness, not having old Joan Latimer's fine 
 instinct for "quality ways." "If you'll 
 believe me, ma'am, when I took him out an 
 umbrella that wet Saturday, he made me 
 come under it myself, and walked me all 
 the way up to the front, just as if I'd been 
 a lady born, and comes out and looks at 
 everything and makes himself as free-like, 
 just as if he was one of us. And I'm sure,
 
 278 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 ma'am, we all of us sets a deal of store by 
 him, we do ; and Miss Maplethorpe, she 
 always has short-cakes ready for him, be- 
 cause he says he never tastes any like them 
 anywhere else." 
 
 " Really that is very nice," said Millicent, 
 calling to the gardener for a bit of string to 
 tie up the bunch of herbs. u Well, now, you 
 may take these to Miss Phebe, with my 
 kind regards, and say I think she will find 
 them useful to put into the soup. I daresay 
 you often have soup, don't you ?" 
 
 u Oh, yes, ma'am !" said Faith, quite as 
 ready to give information on one subject as 
 another, " and you'd be astonished how Miss 
 Maplethorpe makes it out of almost nothing, 
 as you may say. I'm sure, ma'am, there's 
 never anything wasted in our house, or, 
 Miss Phebe says, we shouldn't be able to 
 make ends meet. Miss Phebe will be real 
 glad of these here, because she says it makes
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 279 
 
 such a difference having a little flavouring, 
 especially when there isn't a deal of meat to 
 begin upon." 
 
 And away went Faith, bright and happy, 
 and quite unconscious that she had said 
 anything that her mistresses would not have 
 said, if they had been in her place.
 
 280 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 Tf^HAT was why Millicent was making her 
 -*- call this morning at the cottage with 
 Selina. She had been wanting for some 
 time past to get Mr. Ducross to dine with 
 them, and when she had found out from 
 Faith that he really was intimate with the 
 "old ladies," as she called them — so inti- 
 mate that she might make use of them as a 
 bait for getting him to the house — she de- 
 termined to go at once and get the matter 
 settled. But she was not going to put it 
 on that ground, as if the Miss Maplethorpes 
 could help her at all, and so she mentioned
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 281 
 
 that little rumour about the sketching of 
 the interior, in order that they might know 
 their place at once, and duly appreciate the 
 favour she was about to bestow in asking 
 them to meet him upon what might be called 
 a footing of equality. 
 
 " Pa said he should like Burro wby to 
 have a little cultivated society when he 
 comes home next month, because in India, 
 you know, he is accustomed to the very 
 best people, and we have been thinking a 
 long time of showing a little attention to 
 Mr. Ducross. He never seems to get into 
 society at all, so we are going to have him 
 and Mr. Anson some day next week. A 
 seven-o'clock dinner, you know ; and pa 
 said, as Mr. Ducross had been very kind to 
 you, perhaps you would like to meet him at 
 our house." 
 
 This rather took away the Miss Maple- 
 thorpes' breath. In all the thirty years of
 
 282 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 their life at the cottage, they had never been 
 asked to any of the Atcherley banquets, 
 though many a time Mrs. Atcherley, who 
 said she firmly believed that the poor things 
 never got a full meal from one month's end 
 to another — they carried it in their looks — 
 asked them over to what Millicent called 
 luncheon the day after a big dinner, and 
 generously regaled them on the remains of 
 game pies, oyster patties, saddles of mutton, 
 jellies, blancmanges, and other delicacies of 
 the season, because things that had been 
 " broken into " could not be sent back to 
 the hotel people who generally supplied 
 the feast, and so might just as well be got 
 rid of in that way. But never until now 
 had they been bidden to sit, as it were, 
 above the salt, and see the banquet in its 
 pristine beauty. 
 
 They were not, as Millicent thought they
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 283 
 
 ought to have been, overpowered with gra- 
 titude at the opportunity of meeting Mr. 
 Ducross in what she considered his own 
 sphere of society. Miss Maplethorpe de- 
 murred. They were not accustomed, she 
 said, to go into company. As for Miss 
 Phebe, she had slightly conscientious scru- 
 ples. Dinner at one was a necessity, but 
 dinner at seven was worldly, and worldly- 
 mindedness was a thins: she had been fight- 
 ing against ever since she was fifteen. She 
 did not like to say boldly that seven o'clock 
 was a sinful hour — indeed, she would have 
 felt a little difficulty in putting it in that 
 way, though at the same time she clearly 
 felt that to be dining by gaslight, with 
 flowers on the table, and a man carving; 
 meats at the sideboard, was a concession to 
 the world which she could not comfortably 
 make.
 
 284 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 (l I leave it to you, Callis," she said, mildly. 
 "You always know what is right. Mr. 
 Atcherley is very kind." 
 
 " Of course," said Millicent, patronizingly, 
 " we are aware that you dine in the middle 
 of the day, but I daresay, by seven o'clock, 
 you will be quite ready for another meal ; 
 and we don't intend it to be a large party, 
 only Mr. Ducross, and Mr. Anson, and your- 
 selves." 
 
 "And never mind your dresses," put in 
 Selina, thinking that they would probably be 
 urged as the next loophole of escape. She 
 knew as w T ell as her sister that the Miss 
 Maplethorpes would a great deal rather not 
 go out to a -seven o'clock dinner ; but upon 
 getting them depended getting Mr. Ducross, 
 who had refused once or twice before ; and 
 upon getting Mr. Ducross depended getting 
 Mr. Anson, who would be sure to accept if 
 they could tell him he was going to meet
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 285 
 
 the head-master. "Those black silks that 
 you wear on a Sunday will be all right. I 
 daresay Mr. D across won't mind, and I'm 
 sure we shan't, so don't be uncomfortable 
 about it," 
 
 " Besides, you know," she continued, with 
 the air of one who is quite accustomed to 
 the ways of good society, " nobody ever 
 gives dress dinner-parties in Lent. We're 
 going to be as quiet as possible ourselves, 
 just high necks, and no flowers in our hair." 
 
 This was re-assuring, but Millicent decided 
 the matter for them. 
 
 " Of course they'll come," she said to her 
 sister ; and then, turning to the two ladies, 
 she added, " Pa and ma said we weren't to 
 let you off on any account, for they are sure 
 it will do you all the good in the world to 
 get shaken up a little. We shall write to 
 Mr. Ducross at once, and ask him to fix his 
 own day next week, and then I will let you
 
 286 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 know. I suppose all evenings are alike to 
 you? 
 
 ''Except chapel night," meekly suggested 
 Phebe, who felt that she was now committed 
 both to the hour and the worldliness. " I 
 never like to miss the week evening means." 
 
 Millicent looked inquiringly. Of course, 
 in their position, they did not know any- 
 thing about chapel. Indeed, to awaken 
 Miss Atcherley's most thunderous expression 
 of countenance, and to provoke her most 
 dignified private remonstrances, her mother 
 had only, in the presence of a chance caller, 
 innocently to refer to the fact that when 
 they had the grocery and drapery, before 
 she was married, her father was one of the 
 leading men among the Independents, and 
 sat in the front pew, and could do as he 
 liked with the minister, a privilege which 
 good Mrs. Atcherley was wont to recall 
 with some little pride, as proving that they
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 287 
 
 were not such very ordinary people, after 
 all. 
 
 11 Oh, chapel ! I really did not know 
 you went to chapel except on Sundays. I 
 thought it was only the very poor people 
 who had what they called prayer-meetings. 
 I'm not sure if that is the right word, but 
 I think it is something like it — prayer-meet- 
 ings all sorts of nights." 
 
 "No," said Phebe, glad to dispel the 
 darkness of an unbeliever ; " we have the 
 prayer-meetings on Saturdays, but besides 
 them we have a most profitable week even- 
 ing service, with short sermon from our 
 minister, or one of the local brethren, and 
 I'm sure I often feel, when sitting under 
 him at that time, as much profit " 
 
 Here Callis relieved the situation by say- 
 ing, with a calm sort of authority — 
 
 "There is service at the chapel on 
 Wednesday evenings, and my sister never
 
 288 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 likes to miss it. I am quite sure she would 
 not go out anywhere on that night." 
 
 Phebe's eyes rested with infinite gratitude 
 upon Callis for saying this. It had taken 
 such a weight off her mind. She felt the 
 matter was settled now. 
 
 "Very well," said Millicent, "then we 
 won't name Wednesday, but you'll come on 
 any other day that is convenient to Mr. 
 Ducross. That's settled." 
 
 And Millicent's manner, though she did 
 not say the words, conveyed as plainly as 
 possible the meaning that people, who for 
 thirty years had had their daily bread sup- 
 plied to them from Mr. Atcherley's granaries, 
 must not think of taking such a liberty as 
 declining Mr. Atcherley's invitations, when 
 it pleased him to offer them. 
 
 " Of course we'll send a cab for you if it 
 rains," said Selina, " and we'll send you 
 back in one, anyhow it isn't nice being out
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 289 
 
 in the dark without a gentleman. Pa said 
 we were to mention to you about the 
 cab, though I daresay if it's fine you'd 
 rather walk ; you could easily bring your 
 caps in a basket.'' 
 
 "If it rains, perhaps we had better not 
 come at all," suggested Miss Maplethorpe. 
 
 Millicent went through a brief mental 
 process. If these two odd, independent 
 women, whom Mr. Ducross had taken such 
 a fancy to, once accepted the invitation, 
 that would probably be enough to induce 
 him to accept too, and then whether they 
 came or not, would of course be of no con- 
 sequence. But then again, it would be a 
 good thing for hex mother to have some one 
 to talk to, or she might be shocking the 
 two gentlemen by some of her revelations 
 about those good old times which she was 
 so fond of dragging up. With the Miss 
 Maplethorpes it did not signify. Nothing 
 
 vol. i. u
 
 290 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 ever seemed to shock them. Mrs. Atcherley 
 might launch out to her heart's content 
 about grocery and drapery and egg selling, 
 and front pews at the chapel, and all that 
 sort of thing, and they would listen to it all 
 without in the least degree altering their 
 opinion of her. So, rain or no rain, the cab 
 had better be sent, and then they would be 
 made sure of. 
 
 Therefore Millicent said with almost ma- 
 tronly kindness, everything having thus 
 passed before her mind's eye — 
 
 " Oh, dear, no, nothing of the sort ! Pa 
 would be very disappointed indeed if you 
 didn't come. The cab is nothing to him, 
 and you are not to bring your caps in a 
 basket. You shall ride, whether it rains or 
 whether it doesn't, and if there's anything 
 ma can lend you, a little lace, you know, or 
 a brooch, you've only to ask for it, and you 
 shall be perfectly welcome."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 291 
 
 And having thus settled the whole matter, 
 Millicent was preparing to depart ; but 
 Selina, who liked a little gossip, began to 
 enter upon another subject, which in the 
 end proved even more important than the 
 dinner-party. 
 
 u2
 
 292 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 " T\ONT go yet, Millicent," she said, in 
 -*-^ that off-hand, unceremonious man- 
 ner which her elder sister, who went in for 
 repose, so often had occasion to remark 
 upon; "I want to talk about the new 
 vicar. Miss Maplethorpe, if Mr. Ducross 
 comes in so often, has he never said any- 
 thing to you about who is likely to come? 
 He goes to Broadminster and sees the 
 Bishop and all the people there. I should 
 have thought he would be sure to hear if 
 anything really was settled about the 
 living."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 293 
 
 " I thought Mr. Atcherley said it was 
 given away already," replied Miss Maple- 
 thorpe. 
 
 "To the active, practical man, you mean? 
 Oh, that was only what pa heard, and he 
 picks up all sorts of things. Why shouldn't 
 they give it" — and Selina blushed becom- 
 ingly — " to Mr. Anson ? He's one of the 
 curates already, and a most gentlemanly 
 man." 
 
 "Nonsense, Selina," said Millicent, look- 
 ing contemptuously at her sister, " Mr. 
 Anson is a mere boy for such a position. 
 If you had mentioned Mr. Ducross, there 
 would have been more sense in it. Indeed, 
 in my opinion, Mr. Ducross is the proper 
 person, because he has no extreme views, 
 and he would be so active in promoting 
 the welfare of the parish." 
 
 " And the parish would be very active in 
 promoting his, I daresay," returned Selina ;
 
 294 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 " at any rate, I am sure it would never rest 
 until it had promoted him to matrimony. 
 I do hope, if neither he nor Mr. Anson gets 
 it, somebody will come who has a nice wife 
 already. Mrs. Borrowmont has been simply 
 good for nothing, not even an afternoon tea 
 for us all the years since I left the school ; 
 she bows to me like an empress, and that is 
 all we can say." 
 
 " Mrs. Borrowmont is quite a lady," said 
 Millicent; "she has the air of a woman of 
 family." 
 
 "That is just because you know she is 
 second cousin to the Honourable Mrs. 
 Boverley-Carroll. I don't believe you would 
 have found it out unless" returned Selina, 
 both irreverently and ungrammatically; but 
 Millicent took no notice, and addressed her- 
 self to Miss Maplethorpe. 
 
 " I was coming across the Abbey Close 
 yesterday, and I saw a gentleman and lady
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 295 
 
 who bad evidently come to look at the 
 place. He was decidedly High Church, I 
 could see that at a glance, though I was in a 
 great hurry. I was going to the station 
 with Mrs. Bainsley, wife, you know, of the 
 proctor and Chapter clerk at Broadtninster. 
 She had been over to lunch with us." 
 
 "You never told me about the gentle- 
 man," said Selina, eagerly. " What was he 
 like — young ?" 
 
 " Because I had so much to tell you 
 about dear Bella. You know, Miss Maple- 
 thorpe, she was at school with me at Miss 
 Debonair's, and now she seems quite anxious 
 to be intimate again. Very kind of her, I 
 am sure, for I have neglected her shame- 
 fully." 
 
 "Kind, indeed !" and Selina's nose sought 
 the ceiling. Mrs. Bainsley had not taken 
 much notice of her. " Why, it is no such 
 great thing to be a proctor. I don't sup-
 
 296 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 pose he gets more than five or six hun- 
 dred a year ; and what is that to be kind 
 upon ? " 
 
 "They mix in the very best society, 
 Selina, you know that well enough ; and she 
 said she should be most happy to exert her 
 influence to get me a voucher for the next 
 subscription ball." 
 
 " Ah, well ! That would be kind, especi- 
 ally if she would exert her influence to get 
 me one too ; but what about the clergyman, 
 Millicent ? Do tell. Was he tall, or short, 
 or dark, or what was he ?" 
 
 Selina appeared to have quite forgotten 
 by this time that they were making a call 
 upon the Miss Maplethorpes, and that it 
 was scarcely good manners to be engaging 
 her sister in a conversation apart from them. 
 Or perhaps both the girls thought that, under 
 the circumstances, manners might be dis- 
 pensed with. A cab both ways, whether
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 297 
 
 it rained or not, might surely leave a little 
 latitude in other directions. 
 
 " Well, really, I must say I did not take 
 such very particular notice of him. I only 
 saw that he was tall and gentlemanly- 
 looking. My attention was more directed 
 to the lady." 
 
 " Well, then, tell us about her. If she 
 was his wife, it is all in the family. Of 
 course she was his wife." 
 
 " I should think so. She was slight and 
 dark, and had such a lovely polonaise ; 
 plain, but so stylish." 
 
 " Very much draped ?" 
 
 " No, moderate, tyack cashmere, and an 
 amber tie which suited her exactly, and such 
 very elegant manners. And a girl with 
 them — her daughter, I suppose." 
 
 " Oh ! what a nuisance ! as if there weren't 
 plenty of girls in the place already. Was 
 she nice, too ?"
 
 298 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 u Oh, dear, no ! quite common-place, short 
 and stump} 7 , and her hair sticking about all 
 over. Not the least style about her. In 
 fact, whilst they were looking at the Abbey 
 and Vicarage, she was poking about round 
 the roots of the trees, as if she had lost 
 something, or it might be mosses she was 
 looking for ; so ridiculous out there in the 
 open air." 
 
 " Well, if it ivas mosses, Millicent, she 
 wouldn't be likely to find them anywhere 
 but in the open air. You've remem- 
 bered a great deal, considering you were 
 in such a hurry. I always thought you 
 were a person of great observation. But, 
 Miss Maplethorpe, we're quite forgetting 
 you." 
 
 Miss Maplethorpe, apparently thinking 
 the same, had taken her network, and was 
 quietly putting in a sprig. Her hand was 
 trembling a little as she bent down to count
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 299 
 
 the threads. A strange thought had come 
 into her mind as Millicent's description 
 wound itself to a close. The tall, very 
 quiet gentleman ; the dark, pretty lady, with 
 such an air of style about her ; the short, 
 common-place girl with rough hair. Could 
 these be the trio whom accident had brought 
 to her cottage ten years before ? 
 
 It might be so in a story-book ; might it 
 be so in the story of her life ? Did such 
 things ever happen to people? Was Mr. 
 Randolf going to be vicar of Saxelby ? and 
 was Mopsie coming back to her again after 
 all these years, the child of Martin Isel- 
 worth, her own at last ? 
 
 That might be or it might not ; but evi- 
 dently the thought of their being the same 
 had struck Phebe too, for she said, looking 
 up from the work in which she had taken 
 refuge when the Miss Atcherleys dropped 
 them out of the conversation —
 
 300 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 " I have been wondering whether they 
 are the people that came to our house such 
 a long time ago. You remember them, 
 don't } 7 ou, Miss Atcherley ? You and your 
 mother happened to come past just as the 
 little girl was in our garden, and you told 
 us afterwards you had met a lady and gen- 
 tleman who were looking for her. She was 
 just the sort of little girl who might grow 
 up to have rough hair, though I do not 
 fancy she would turn out common-place. 
 And if you remember, the lady was just 
 like that — tall and elegant, and pretty and 
 stylish. I wonder if they could be the 
 same t 
 
 " Well, really," said Millicent, " now you 
 come to speak of it, it is quite possible that 
 the people I met yesterday might be the 
 same. It did not strike me before. Of 
 course I don't remember very distinctly, for 
 it is such a long time ago."
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 301 
 
 11 Yes, ten years,' 1 said the irrepressible 
 Selina, " but I should think you might re- 
 member that well enough. Why, I am 
 sure, if I had been there, I could have told 
 you all about it. I know it was the very 
 day ma went to buy me the earrings. And 
 don't you remember ma told us what price 
 the holland was ? You know she under- 
 stood about it." 
 
 Millicent frowned upon her sister. In a 
 general way Selina was prudent ; only with 
 the Miss Maplethorpes, who knew all about 
 them, she admitted the fact of the antece- 
 dent grocery and drapery, whereas Milli- 
 cent preserved a dignified silence upon 
 everything which dated past her education 
 at Miss Debonair's finishing establishment. 
 That was her Hegira, the point at which 
 her chronology commenced. 
 
 " I remember, too, ma said she was a 
 very nice little girl, if only her hair were
 
 302 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 smoother. If she really is coming, she will 
 keep me in countenance, for what I spend 
 now in bandoline is more than anyone 
 would believe. You've a great deal to be 
 thankful for, Millicent, in a smooth head of 
 hair, whether there are many brains under 
 it or not." 
 
 Millicent drew herself up. Miss Debonair 
 had taught her that perfect self-possession 
 was the acme of style. And she prided 
 herself upon being self-possessed according- 
 ly — at least, in society. 
 
 " Selina, how ridiculous you are ! Any- 
 one would think you had had no education 
 at all. I took quite as many prizes at 
 school as any of the other girls. If you 
 want to talk any longer about the new 
 vicar, I will leave you to it, as I have had 
 quite enough of the subject. Then, Miss 
 Maplethorpe, it is settled, and as soon as we 
 have heard from Mr. Ducross which evening
 
 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 303 
 
 will suit him best, I will send over and let 
 you know." 
 
 With which Miss Atcherley took her 
 leave, not so much as condescending a look 
 towards her sister. 
 
 But Selina, who never meant quarrelling 
 when she could help it, jumped up too, and 
 after shaking hands with the Miss Maple- 
 thorpes, and saying how very funny it would 
 be if the little girl with the rough hair 
 really did turn out to be the same, she 
 hurried after Miss Debonair's chef d'oeuvre, 
 and might have been seen two minutes 
 afterwards making it up with her on the 
 road home — at least, attempting to do 
 so. 
 
 " I say, Millicent, what made you cut up 
 rough like that ?" 
 
 " Selina ! how can you use that sort of 
 words? It gives such an air of under breed- 
 ing to the whole family. If you talk in
 
 304 THE LAST OF HER LINE. 
 
 that way when Mr. Ducross comes, he'll 
 think we are mere parvenus." 
 \ "Which is just what we are, and so I 
 don't care if • he does think it. It's just a3 7 
 pleasant being & parvenu as being anything 
 else, so far as I have found out." 
 
 "That is because you have no instincts. 
 If you gave yourself to it, we might rise to, 
 any position, and papa, with his wealth. If 
 only it was not for mamma." 
 
 But there Selina fired up. 
 
 Meanwhile Callis went on with the net 
 sprigging, which was to be sent off to Broad* 
 minster that evening. And doubtless she, 
 too, thought, with Selina, how very funny 
 it would be if the little girl with the rough 
 hair really did turn out to be Mopsie Isel- 
 worth. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BY D. MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.
 
 ■ I