e--more shame to me, perhaps you'll say. I couldn't expect him to
think of things like candles."

"Oh!--And is he--is he dead?"

"No ma'am, he isn't dead," said Kingston. And from the shortness of her
tone and the steadiness with which she averted her face Lesley came to
the conclusion that she did not want to be questioned any more.

Lesley went down to dinner feeling that she had made some new and
extraordinary discoveries. She noticed that her father and her aunt made
several allusions which would have seemed mysterious and repellant to
her the day before, but which now possessed an almost tragic interest.
When before had she heard her aunt speak casually of a Mothers' Meeting
and a Lending Library? These were common-place matters to the ordinary
English girl; but to Lesley they possessed the elements of a romance.
For was it not by means of hackneyed, common-place machinery of this
kind that cultured men and women put themselves into relation with the
great, suffering, coarse, uncultured, human-hearted poor?

CHAPTER XIII.

LESLEY SEEKS ADVICE.

Added to Lesley's new views of life, there was also a new feeling for
her father. In the first rush of enthusiastic admiration for his book,
she forgot all that she had heard against him, and believed--for the
moment--that he was all Maurice Kenyon represented him to be. But
naturally this state of mind could not last. The long years of her
mother's influence told against any claim to love or respect on the
father's part. Lesley remembered how bitterly Lady Alice spoke of him.
She could not think that her mother had been wrong.

It is a terrible position for a son or daughter--to have to judge
between father and mother. It is a wrong position, and one in which
Lesley felt instinctively that she ought never to have been placed. Of
course it was impossible for her to help it. Father and mother had
virtually made her their judge. They said to her, "Live for a year with
each of us, and choose which you prefer. You cannot have us both." And
as the only true and natural position for a child is that in which he or
she can have both, Lesley Brooke was in a very trying situation. She had
begun life in her father's house as her mother's ardent partisan; and
she was her mother's partisan still. Only she was not quite sure whether
she was not going to find that she could love her father too. And in
that case, Lesley was tremulously certain that Lady Alice would accuse
he