white arms, lures wickedly unattainable to my supposed swooning senses; she talked, sweetly serious, with Lady Skene, on the subject of the divine goodness in damning three-fourths of the world for the sake of the other quarter, and dropped texts from her lips as daintily as cherry stones. If it was all designed as a sharp lesson to me, it was all signally successful. “The girl is mother to the woman,” I thought. She is a humbug here as she was a humbug in my lodge. It is nothing but her puckish instinct to play a part to desire. I never came to the house but of nights to dine, conforming only, in its strictly literal sense, with Lord Skene’s expressed wish; and then I would dawdle out an impatient hour in the drawing-room, and the moment the clock struck ten be off to my woods again. Lady Skene had accepted my reappearance with no comment but the briefest greeting; but I thought her manner to me was more chilling than ever. She seemed resolved upon disallowing my last claim to her consideration. As a child it had always been as if, coldly and softly, she had disengaged my fingers one by one from her skirts to which they clung. Now we were utterly dissevered; but I cried out still that I might not hate her. She did not hate me, I am sure. She only looked upon me as a brand, a thing foredoomed, whom it were useless to shape for a destiny which could never be his. Perhaps in her deepest heart there may have lurked a terror of herself, were she once to permit herself to think of me--a fear that after all, in some quick frenzy, she might be moved to disown the pietist for the mother. I will believe it. Such inhumanity as hers seems incomprehensible without. As I held to my wild habits by day, playing only in the evenings up to polite convention, I was certain to encounter Miss Christmas about the grounds, and as a matter of fact I did, many times. On such occasions she would always pass me with a warble and a stare, or a cock to her kittenish nose, as if I were an odorous stable-boy, which as regularly tickled me, until one day I felt tired of it. I had run upon her at the head of the thicket path which opened into the “Baby’s Garden,” and I suddenly barred her way, so that she could not get round me right or left. “Were you going down there?” I asked, signifying the lodge. Fury flew into her eyes. “How dare you--how dare you suggest it!” she cried. “Why, it wouldn’t be for the first time, you know,” I said. She looked in helpless anger about her a moment; then faced me like a young harpy. “I thought, perhaps, in spite of all--of all the misfortune at your birth--you might be a gentleman at heart. But I was mistaken, and you are the very farthest from it; and I see now that it’s impossible ever to hope to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” “Thank you, for my father. My mother can answer for herself. The pillmaker’s granddaughter is the best judge, of course.” “Let me pass, please.”