precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor the
harshness of life's web, but was thrust cheerfully, if need were, into
the briar bush, and could take hold of any crawling horror. Ruin was
mining the walls of her cottage, as already it had mined and subverted
Mr. Archer's palace. Well, she faced it with a bright countenance and a
busy hand. She had got some washing, some rough seamstress work from the
"Green Dragon," and from another neighbour ten miles away across the
moor. At this she cheerfully laboured, and from that height she could
afford to pity the useless talents and poor attitude of Mr. Archer. It
did not change her admiration, but it made it bearable. He was above her
in all ways; but she was above him in one. She kept it to herself, and
hugged it. When, like all young creatures, she made long stories to
justify, to nourish, and to forecast the course of her affection, it was
this private superiority that made all rosy, that cut the knot, and
that, at last, in some great situation, fetched to her knees the
dazzling but imperfect hero. With this pretty exercise she beguiled the
hours of labour, and consoled herself for Mr. Archer's bearing. Pity was
her weapon and her weakness. To accept the loved one's faults, although
it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain, and this pity it was
which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one element of true emotion
to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.

Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the "Green Dragon" and
brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer. He, upon seeing it, winced
like a man under the knife: pain, shame, sorrow, and the most trenchant
edge of mortification cut into his heart and wrung the steady composure
of his face.

"Dear heart! have you bad news?" she cried.

But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when, later
on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the threshold, as if
with words prepared beforehand. "There are some pains," said he, "too
acute for consolation, or I would bring them to my kind consoler. Let
the memory of that letter, if you please, be buried." And then as she
continued to gaze at him, being, in spite of herself, pained by his
elaborate phrase, doubtfully sincere in word and manner: "Let it be
enough," he added haughtily, "that if this matter wring my heart, it
doth not touch my conscience. I am a man, I would have you to know, who
suffers undeservedly."

He had never