there to minister to her every want and whim, to bend the knee, bate the breath, and lower the eye before her when she crossed their path, and if they did these things silently as machinery, it was well. Her sole duty was to find them food and wages, and she kept her contract. But if they failed in one iota they were dismissed. It would be unfair to suppose that Lady Harriet was an exceptionally hard woman, because this was her relationship with her household. She was indeed nothing of the kind. On the contrary, in some respects she was a kind-hearted person enough, and would for example have turned away her housekeeper on the spot, had she been made aware that the servants were badly fed or uncomfortable in their bedrooms, or anything of that sort. Sins of that kind affected the reputation of her mansion, and jarred, moreover, on her sense of comfortableness. To have life flow easily, to see and feel none of the roughnesses of existence--this was Lady Harriet's ideal. For the rest--how could she help it if menials were low creatures? They were born so, and it was for her comfort probably that Providence thus ordered the gradations of society. She had been heard, moreover, to plume herself upon the exceptionally good treatment her servants got, and to declare that she knew it to be much better than that of her sister, who was the wife of a lord bishop of a neighbouring diocese, and a woman of fashion. Lady Harriet was, in short, an average sample of the modern English aristocrat. Nay, in some respects she was better than the average woman of her class, for she was gifted with some touch of the shrewd brains that had lifted her grandfather, the London clothier, to great wealth and an Irish peerage. In another sphere, as the parsons say, she might have distinguished herself as a woman of affairs, but she loved ease, disliked trouble, and wrapped her mind up in the refinements proper to high birth and breeding. First amongst these she placed exemption from all the cares and duties of maternity, and from the worries of household management. Her aim was not lofty, and even her ladyship had begun to fear that somehow her life had been a failure. A weary look was often seen on her face--visible to the meanest domestic--telling all who saw it that luxury could not insure any poor mortal from care any more than from disease and death. But cannot one trace the hideous grinning skull beneath the skin of the fairest and loftiest in the land? Care comes to all, and sorrow, and pain, and for years before Sally went to the Grange, the mistress thereof had felt the worm gnawing at her heart.