THINGS happened as John and Lady Blount had planned them. Sister Theophila, having satisfied herself that Unity Blake was not a second time being thrown to the wolves--Lady Blount herself undertook the negotiations--surrendered her without many regretful pangs. Unity Blake, fatalistic child of circumstance, surrendered herself without coherent thought. World authorities, vague in their nature, but irresistibly compelling in their force, had governed her life from her earliest years. The possibility of revolt, of assertion of her own individuality, was undreamed of in her narrow philosophy. She had the outlook on life of the slave; not the slave of the mettlesome temperament depicted by the late Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the late Mr. Longfellow, but the unaspiring deaf-mute of a barbaric harem. It is true that Lady Blount asked her whether she would like to go away to a nice house by the seaside, and afterward live for ever and ever with the kind gentleman who gave her peppermint bull's-eyes and the kind lady who had visited her one day, bringing her a pair of woollen mittens, and that Unity, after the manner of her class, had said, “Yes, ma'am”; but the consultation of Unity's wishes had been a pure formality. She had no idea of what the seaside meant, having never seen the sea or speculated on its nature. She could form no notion of her future life with the kind lady and gentleman, save perhaps that the pokers of the establishment might have other uses than as instruments of chastisement and that, at any rate, they might be applied cold and not red-hot. If they had taken her up without a word, and put her in an open coffin, and lowered her into an open grave, and left her there, Unity would have made no complaint, having at once no standard whereby to assess the right and wrong done to her, and no tribunal to which she could appeal higher than the vague world authorities above mentioned. The instinctive animal might have clambered out of the pit and wandered about the country-side in search of food and shelter, but that would have been all. The fervent human soul would have played but a small part.