After a careful investigation, carried out quietly by herself, the Duchess chose for her sphere of charitable labour a district lying in the south of the Thames, between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges. Here, under the shadow of the Archbishop’s Palace, she found heathendom as utter as, and vice more rank than that the Church was sending out missionaries to cope with in China and Hindustan. The Vicar of the parish in which this region was included, whose name was Dr. Coles, was a pious, learned, and zealous divine, but he was believed to construe his ordination vows according to a code of honour more Roman than English. The services at St. Jermyn’s bore little resemblance to those of a Protestant place of worship, and it was suspected that they were but the outward and visible signs of a still deeper cleavage between the Doctor’s private beliefs and those affirmed in the articles of religion which he had subscribed. The Vicarage was the resort of a great number of young men from the theological colleges, among whom the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s appeared to enjoy an authority not explained by his rank in the Church. Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going about the slums of St. Jermyn’s. The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm, or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own. It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning after she had seen her son. The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”