The principles of honour, rectitude, truthfulness, generosity, and other moral virtues were cultivated in Mary's home, but the "charity, or love," without which, St. Paul tells us, all our doings are as "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals," was wanting. Love to God and love to man, on which "hang all the law and the commandments," were known only in theory. Mary Armstrong had yet to learn that to her Father in heaven she must turn in trouble and sorrow, and in future days she might have said almost in the words of Wolsey, "Had I but served my Father in heaven as diligently as I studied to please my father on earth, He would not have forsaken me now in my hour of sorrow." And yet for these days of trial Mary at last could feel thankful. Christianity in her home had been an acknowledged fact. Its outward duties, its moral principles, were all inculcated; but when our daily life passes smoothly, untroubled, by sorrow or poverty, which is, perhaps, the hardest trial of all to bear, especially when accompanied by sickness and pain, we are apt to forget the sweet principle of love to God and love to man which, St. Paul tells us, "is the fulfilling of the law;" and Mary Armstrong's life hitherto had known no trials more painful than those caused by her father's eccentricities. CHAPTER VIII. ENGLEFIELD GRANGE. More than thirty-five years before the period of which we write, James Halford, who had been travelling tutor to the son of a nobleman, commenced a school at Bayswater, then a pretty rural village. His father, a country surgeon in good practice, had given his only son a superior education, but the young man had no liking for his father's profession. To send James to the university Mr. Halford felt would be beyond his means, and the young man's wish to enter the Church was therefore set aside, causing him great disappointment. Ultimately he was engaged as tutor to the youth already spoken of, and while with him in that capacity became acquainted with the governess of his sisters, Clara Marston, whom he afterwards married. At the death of his father a small but unexpected amount of money fell into his hands. He almost immediately relinquished his engagement with the son of Lord Rivers, and took a house at Bayswater. Trifling as the sum was, it still formed a sufficient capital upon which to commence a school, and so well had he performed his duty with his pupil that the high recommendation of the young man's relatives soon gained him several pupils. Six months after his father's death Clara Marston became his wife. For ten years they continued to carry on their school most successfully, till bricks and mortar had completely destroyed the countrified character of the place, and obliged them at last to seek a home elsewhere.