“What is all this, my dear? Can you explain it to me? Some good action of yours, I suppose, for which I am to be thanked.” Lady Davenant looked at the letter. She had nothing to do with the matter, she said; but, on second thoughts, exclaimed, “This is Granville Beauclerc’s doing, I am clear!” The letter was from Count Polianski, one of the poor banished Poles; now poor, but who had been formerly master of a property estimated at about one hundred and sixty-five thousand _available individuals_. In attempting to increase the happiness and secure the liberty of these available individuals, the count had lost every thing, and had been banished from his country--a man of high feeling as well as talents, and who had done all he could for that unhappy country, torn to pieces by demagogues from within and tyrants from without. Lady Davenant now recollected that Beauclerc had learned from her all this, and had heard her regretting that the circumstances in which Lord Davenant was placed at this moment, prevented the possibility of his affording this poor count assistance for numbers of his suffering fellow-countrymen who had been banished along with him, and who were now in London in the utmost distress. Lady Davenant remembered that she had been speaking to Granville on this subject the very day that he had abandoned his falconry project. “Now I understand it all,” said she; “and it is like all I know and all I have hoped of him. These hundreds a-year which he has settled on these wretched exiles, are rather better disposed of in a noble national cause, than in pampering one set of birds that they may fly at another set.” “And yet this is done,” said Lord Davenant, “by one of the much reviled, high-bred English gentlemen--among whom, let the much reviling, low-bred English democrats say what they will, we find every day instances of subscription for public purposes from private benevolence, in a spirit of princely charity to be found only in our own dear England--England with all her faults.’” “But this was a less ordinary sort of generosity of Granville’s,” said Lady Davenant,--“the giving up a new pleasure, a new whim with all its gloss fresh upon it, full and bright in his eye.” “True,” said Lord Davenant; “I never saw a strong-pulling fancy better thrown upon its haunches.” The white dove, whose life Helen had saved, was brought home by Beauclerc, and was offered to her and accepted. Whether she had done a good or a bad action, by thus saving the life of a pigeon at the expense of a heron, may be doubted, and will be decided according to the several tastes of ladies and gentlemen for herons or doves. As Lady Davenant remarked, Helen’s humanity (or dove-anity, as Churchill called it,) was of that equivocal sort which is ready to destroy one creature to save another which may happen to be a greater favourite.