important matter, though possibly
Lesley might not have thought it so.

She turned to him at last with a frank, decisive gesture.

"It _is_ true," she said. "I knew nothing about his books or his works,
and so how could I appreciate them? I had never heard of 'The
Unexplored' before. You are right, and I had no business to be so angry.
But how do you know that I am different now?"

"Oh, I know you are," said Maurice, confidently. "You have come to the
club for one thing, you see; and you sang to the people and looked at
them--well, as if you cared. And you have read 'The Unexplored' _now_?"

"Yes. I have," said Lesley, hesitatingly.

"And you like it?"

"Yes--I like it." The girl looked away, and went on nervously,
hesitatingly. "It is very well done," she said, "It is very clever."

"Oh, if that is all you can find to say about it!"

"But isn't it a great deal?--Mr. Kenyon, I don't know what to say about
it. You see I can't be sure whether it is all--true."

"True? The story? But, of course----"

"Of course the _story_ is not true. I am not such a goose as that. But
is the meaning of it true? the moral, so to speak? Is there so much
wickedness in the world as my father says? So much vice and wealth and
selfishness on the one side: so much misery and poverty and crime on the
other? You are a doctor, and you must have seen a great deal of London
life: you ought to know. Is it an exaggeration, or is it true?"

There was such intensity and such pathos in her tones that Kenyon was
silent for a minute or two, startled by the vivid reality which she had
attached to her father's views and ideas. He could not have answered her
lightly, even if it had been in his nature to do so.

"Before God," he said, solemnly, "it is all true--every word of it."

"Then what can we do," said Lesley, gently, "but go down into the midst
of it and help?"

Mr. Maurice Kenyon, being a man of ardent temperament, always vows that
he lost his heart to Lesley there and then. It is possible that if she
had not been a very pretty girl, the most noble of sentiments might have
fallen unheeded from her lips; but as she was "so young, so sweet, so
delicately fair," Kenyon could not hear his own opinions reciprocated
without an answering thrill. How delightful would it be to walk through
life with a woman of this kind by one's side! a woman, whose face was a
picture, whose every movement a poem, whose soul was as finely touched
to fine issues