mmon people about her affirmed without
hesitation that she was "daft." She rode no more, but she kept all
the horses and dogs as usual. She cultivated a taste she had for
antiquities; she wrote poetry--- ballad poetry--which people who were
considered judges thought well of; and flinging these and other things
into the awful chasm that had been made in her life, she tried her
best to fill it up. She set herself to consider the poor man's case,
and made experiments and gave advice which confirmed her poorer
brethren in their opinion that she was daft; but as her hand was
always very wide open, and they pitied her sorrow, she was much loved,
although they laughed at her zeal in preserving old ruins and her
wrath if an old stone was moved, and told, and firmly believed, that
she wrote and posted letters to Lord Arthur. What was perhaps more to
the purpose of filling the chasm than any of these things, Lady Arthur
adopted a daughter, an orphan child of a cousin of her own, who came
to her two years after her husband's death, a little girl of nine.

II.

Alice Garscube's education was not of the stereotyped kind. When
she came to Garscube Hall, Lady Arthur wrote to the head-master of
a normal school asking if he knew of a healthy, sagacious,
good-tempered, clever girl who had a thorough knowledge of the
elementary branches of education and a natural taste for teaching. Mr.
Boyton, the head-master, replied that he knew of such a person whom he
could entirely recommend, having all the qualities mentioned; but
when he found that it was not a teacher for a village school that her
ladyship wanted, but for her own relation, he wrote to say that he
doubted the party he had in view would hardly be suitable: her father,
who had been dead for some years, was a workingman, and her mother,
who had died quite recently, supported herself by keeping a little
shop, and she herself was in appearance and manner scarcely enough
of the lady for such a situation. Now, Lady Arthur, though a firm
believer in birth and race, and by habit and prejudice an aristocrat
and a Tory, was, we know, eccentric by nature, and Nature will always
assert itself. She wrote to Mr. Boyton that if the girl he recommended
was all he said, she was a lady inside, and they would leave the
outside to shift for itself. Her ladyship had considered the matter.
She could get decayed gentlewomen and clergymen and officers'
daughters by the dozen, but she did not want a gi