Mab went home from her visit to Mrs. Brown a very different girl from that little person who had run off from the group of her friends to ask the co-operation of the schoolmistress--which had seemed to her a very amusing mission. She had wondered much how it would be taken--with satire or with pleasure. Mrs. Brown’s tongue was one which could sting, Mab knew; but a tongue is all the more amusing for that, when its sting is not for one’s self. Mab rather liked to hear her sending her arrows from right to left. She had thought that probably it was misfortune that caused this, and the sense which people who have seen better days are apt to entertain that it is somehow a wrong to themselves that other people should be prosperous. We are all, unfortunately, too apt to feel so. Blatant prosperity, smiling and smooth, how hard it is for the rest of us not to hate its superior well-being, even if we do not think that it is something taken from ourselves. But that was a very different thing from the dreadful confidences which Mab had received, and which made of her, even herself, who had certainly nothing to do with Mrs. Brown’s sin, a heavy-laden and burdened spirit. Little Mab, who had run down to the schoolhouse as light as a feather--though she was not, as the reader is aware, one of your thread-paper girls--came back from it as if she had carried that pack upon her back which Christian had in the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. The pack belonged to Christian himself, and he had a right to bear it; but, I repeat, Mab had nothing to do with Mrs. Brown’s sins. And I am not at all sure what Mab conceived these sins to be; she knew nothing about them: they were something vaguely terrible, vaguely yet frightfully guilty to her childish sense of purity and rectitude. And yet Mrs. Brown was the schoolmistress, the woman who had all the Watcham girls in her hands; and Mab alone, of all the parish, knew that she was not fit to be trusted with that charge. She walked home with the tread and the air of a woman of fifty, her soft brow lined with prodigious scores of thought, her spiritual back bent under this burden. Mab knew, while all the parish lay in darkness. And Mab, the Rector’s niece, and a district visitor, and Lady Bountiful from her cradle, had a duty to the parish which a person less bound with ties of duty might not have thought of. There was her duty to the parish, and, on the other hand, there was her duty to her penitent; for, though she had not asked to have that high office, still Mab felt that she had been adopted as the confessor of the sinner. Sinner was a better name for her than penitent, for she was not penitent; but yet she had trusted Mab. And what was the person so trusted to do?--betray it to the parish, or to any one in the parish? Oh, no, no! And yet was not that to betray the parish and its trust and confidence in herself? If you can imagine any subject more likely to score with wrinkles a brow of seventeen, such a