consciousness of such undeviating rectitude of practice gave her manner a commanding air of self-confidence. Religion, too, tightened its hold on her. The better she felt herself becoming, the more useful and valuable, not only in herself, but as an example of conduct, the more her intimacy with Celestial Persons grew. Priggishness, self-conceit, as well as all the other grosser mental errors, were very far from the well-balanced security of her nature. The worst that an enemy could have said would be that she was a little slow to admit the possibility of any limitations in herself. In earlier years she had already been calmly self-confident. Time had only justified and reinforced the calm as well as the self-confidence, so she went her methodical way, a model for all matrons, and had, in the neat garden of her life, no disorderly plots, no tangles, no weeds. It was a precise arrangement of well-kept beds--everything in its place, and no profitable herb omitted. Her husband wandered outside its borders, and roamed the shrubberies of freedom. But Gundred found all that her nature ever needed to ask in that daily round, that common task for which her character had been so perfectly fitted by time and fate. Their life oscillated between London, Ivescar, and Brakelond. In London Gundred had her factory girls, her hospitals, her educational societies; at Brakelond there were the tenants to be looked after, the Castle and all its immense organism to be managed, the Tory Candidate to be upheld by threats of Gundred’s withdrawal of her custom from all who should so far presume upon the Ballot as to oppose him. At Ivescar there were farms, gardens, parishes to be controlled by Gundred’s masterful eye. For a masterful eye it was. Kingston slid back into himself, never regained his full vital energies, renounced interest in his career, and yielded the reins of government into his wife’s hands. As her sphere widened, and her power increased, Gundred’s unquestionable majesty increased proportionately, until the habit of ruling had grown so strong in her that no one would have presumed to doubt the wisdom or cavil at the commands of that tranquil little despot, whose voice was never raised in anger, whose orders never admitted the possibility of dispute. She arranged the lives of all around her with the serenest certainty, and indomitably shepherded her army of dependents, factory girls, tenants, and servants along the path of righteous happiness. As mistress she was a success; as a hostess the same strenuous qualities, the same self-sufficiency brought her the same success. She could never hold a room by her talk, but she could now listen graciously, and disguise her complete inattention by smiles. Clever people went willingly to her houses in London and the country. Her well-dressed, pleasant presence made a becoming quiet background for their conversation, and, as a housekeeper, she was unsurpassed.