and
the aristocratic lived. There was, then, more than beauty and wit and
great social gift, gaiety and charm, in this delicate personality? Yes,
there was something good and sound in her, after all. Her husband's
life was in infinite danger,--had not Brengyn said that his chances
were only one in a thousand?--death stared her savagely in the face;
yet she bore herself as calmly as those women who could not afford the
luxury of tears or the self-indulgence of a despairing indolence; to
whom tragedy was but a whip of scorpions to drive them into action. How
well they all behaved, these society butterflies--Jasmine, Lady
Tynemouth, and the others! But what a wonderful motherliness and
impulsive sympathy steadied by common sense did Al'mah the
singing-woman show!

Her instinct was infallible, her knowledge of how these poor people
felt was intuitive, and her great-heartedness was to be seen in every
motion, heard in every tone of her voice. If she had not had this work
of charity to do, she felt she would have gone shrieking through the
valley, as, this very midnight, she had seen a girl with streaming hair
and bare breast go crying through the streets, and on up the hills to
the deep woods, insane with grief and woe.

Her head throbbed. She felt as though she also could tear the coverings
from her own bosom to let out the fever which was there; for in her
life she had loved two men who had trampled on her self-respect, had
shattered all her pride of life, had made her ashamed to look the world
in the face. Blantyre, her husband, had been despicable and cruel, a
liar and a deserter; and to-night she had seen the man to whom she had
given all that was left of her heart and faith disgrace himself and his
class before the world by a cowardice which no woman could forgive.

Adrian Fellowes had gone back to Glencader to do necessary things, to
prepare the household for any emergency; and she was grateful for the
respite. If she had been thrown with him in the desperate mood of the
moment, she would have lost her self-control. Happily, fate had taken
him away for a few hours; and who could tell what might not happen in a
few hours? Meanwhile, there was humanity's work to be done.

About four o'clock in the morning, when she came out from a cottage
where she had assisted Mr. Mappin in a painful and dangerous operation,
she stood for a moment in reverie, looking up at the hills, whose peace
had been shrilly broken a few hours