‘As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!’ exclaimed Lady Helen. ‘My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season if you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte knows all the world and his wife. And if I’m there, and Miss Leyburn will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect her a little from Aunt Charlotte?’ The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have thought all this effusion insincere or patronizing. But Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only highborn woman he had ever met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the ‘nonsense of rank.’ Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte’s social tolerance to be a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favorite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, must always have found life too romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting from top to bottom, to be measured by any but romantic standards. Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked God every morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired, had only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry, leaving a check behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled. A few days later Mr. Wendover’s crimes as a landowner, his agent’s brutality, young Elsmere’s devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End outbreak, were in everybody’s mouth. The county was roused. The Radical newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming article; Robert, much to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come in to him freely. On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene with an army of workmen. A racy communication from the inspector had reached him two days before, so had a copy of the ‘Churton Advertiser.’ He had spent Sunday in a drinking bout turning over all possible plans of vengeance and evasion. Toward the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever Scotchwoman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the supplies of brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. Then she waited for the moment of collapse which came on toward morning, and with her hands on her hips she poured into him a volley of home-truths which not even Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe’s nerve gave way. He went out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen.