And she _has_ struggled! What means has she not used? what cruel, branding, searing remedies has not she tried--even to that extremest one of belittling, in her _for intérieur_, him whom her whole aching soul and racing blood call out upon as her only lord and love? Has not she haled to the foreground and set in malicious order his deficiencies? told herself to what a common type he belongs--just the yea and nay, straight, unintellectual Anglo-Saxon fighting man? his character, how inferior in interest and complexity to Rupert’s; his mind, how much less subtle; his apprehension, how much less quick; his understanding of herself, how infinitely inferior? And having quite demolished him, having left him scarcely comely and barely brave, she falls on his neck in the secretest recesses of her inveterately guilty heart, and begs his pardon with tears. It is not because he is a hero or a dunce that she loves him. It is for the reason which was already very old when Montaigne penned it: “Parce que c’était, moi! Parce que c’était, lui!” By the date of the Relief of Mafeking, Binning is able to get about a little with a stick, and even to assist with his presence and advice at the bonfire which, by “kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” has had its site transferred, for his special benefit by its builders, the young Darcys, from their own stable-yard to the ampler area of the Chestnuts. Not that the Rectory does not blaze too with subsidiary flames, and breaks out into a forest of flags that makes the bunting which had celebrated Ladysmith sink into insignificance. It would seem impossible that anything could carry the patriotic elation of the clergyman’s family to a higher pitch than it has already reached, yet it is sensibly heightened by the providential coincidence, of which the poultry-yard is the scene, viz. that it is Baden Powell who brings out thirteen chickens on the very day of the raising of the siege. The fact is the more remarkable as two other generals, who were set upon the same day, but were wanting in the patient assiduity of B. P., produced nothing but addled eggs. It is not the Mafeking news, soul-stirring and spirit-lifting as it is, which has produced the inevitable. There is a safe publicity and generality in the emotion it evokes; and Lavinia, hurling billets of wood on to the bonfire, and being exhorted, directed, and scolded by Binning, leaning on the top of his staff, which he ultimately, in the excitement of the moment, throws in too, is in far less peril than Lavinia chokingly reading aloud to its recipient the little paragraph which announces that he is among those to whom the Victoria Cross is to be awarded. She struggles through the small _naked_ record of his achievement.