6 MISS BADSWORTH, M.F.H. 



viction that she was doing her duty and at the same time 

 enduring a certain percentage of the sufferings of the early 

 Christian martyrs, some of her brother's words came to her 

 in the garb of home truths, there was something in what he 

 had said, still no one could say that she was not doing 

 some good. Unconsciously she sat and gazed into the fire, 

 and her thoughts gradually wandered away to Cranston 

 Lodge and the days when they were children together, merry 

 and gay, unconscious of the time which would come and go 

 bringing with it the stern realities of life ; four of them, 

 Hugo, Charles, Margaret, and herself. Of the four, Charles 

 and Margaret had married. She and Hugo had kept in 

 touch more or less all their lives, each had a disappointment 

 somewhere stowed away at the bottom of their hearts to 

 which neither alluded but which both revered in tacit silence. 

 Margaret was dead, Charles had slipped somewhat out of 

 their lives ; a faulty link had snapped in the chain which 

 bound them together — it was a paltry flaw and twenty years 

 should have sufficed for its repair — but they had agreed to 

 difler; people do sometimes for no particular reason that 

 they can determine. It was late when Miss Badsworth 

 retired to her bedchamber. She had enjoyed the luxury 

 of mental wanderings over the past, but the only thing 

 she took with her was a sense of want of confidence in 

 her various schemes and yet a determination to go on with 

 them. 



On the following day Mr. Badsworth called on his lawyers 

 in Lincoln's Inn to transact some business, and finding the 

 senior partner at leisure spent an hour in arranging certain 

 affairs of his own and the affairs of the nation generally ; 

 presently he started up : — 



*• It's raining, by all that's beautiful; I must be off! " he 

 exclaimed, and left his legal adviser wondering why the 

 circumstance of rain should suddenly stir a man to vigorous 

 action. 



After his dinner that evening Mr Badsworth went forth 

 into the murky night ; a soft drizzle was falling. " It'll take 



