profitable than it can be here, even if Tom got back his custom?"

"Oh yes! five times as good,--if he would but go; but he'll not hear of
it."

"Mrs. Bowles, I am very much obliged to you for your confidence, and I
feel sure that all will end happily now we have had this talk. I'll not
press further on you at present. Tom will not stir out, I suppose, till
the evening."

"Ah, sir, he seems as if he had no heart to stir out again, unless for
something dreadful."

"Courage! I will call again in the evening, and then you just take me
up to Tom's room, and leave me there to make friends with him, as I have
with you. Don't say a word about me in the meanwhile."

"But--"

"'But,' Mrs. Bowles, is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles
many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. Nobody
would ever love his neighbour as himself if he listened to all the Buts
that could be said on the other side of the question."

CHAPTER XV.

KENELM now bent his way towards the parsonage, but just as he neared
its glebe-lands he met a gentleman whose dress was so evidently clerical
that he stopped and said,--

"Have I the honour to address Mr. Lethbridge?"

"That is my name," said the clergyman, smiling pleasantly. "Anything I
can do for you?"

"Yes, a great deal, if you will let me talk to you about a few of your
parishioners."

"My parishioners! I beg your pardon, but you are quite a stranger to me,
and, I should think, to the parish."

"To the parish,--no, I am quite at home in it; and I honestly believe
that it has never known a more officious busybody, thrusting himself
into its most private affairs."

Mr. Lethbridge stared, and, after a short pause, said, "I have heard of
a young man who has been staying at Mr. Saunderson's, and is indeed at
this moment the talk of the village. You are--"

"That young man. Alas! yes."

"Nay," said Mr. Lethbridge, kindly, "I cannot myself, as a minister
of the Gospel, approve of your profession, and, if I might take the
liberty, I would try and dissuade you from it; but still, as for the
one act of freeing a poor girl from the most scandalous persecution, and
administering, though in a rough way, a lesson to a savage brute who
has long been the disgrace and terror of the neighbourhood, I cannot
honestly say that it has my condemnation. The moral sense of a community
is generally a right one: you have won the praise of the village. Under
all the circumstanc