pathy for the
sinner.

"Poor devil!" he said, when the whole story of Trent's transgression and
its consequences had been revealed to him. "What a ghastly stone to hang
round a man's neck for the term of his natural life! If they'd shot him,
it would have been more merciful! That would at least have limited the
suffering," he went on, taking Sara's hand and holding it in his strong,
kindly one a moment. "Poor little comrade! Oh, my dear"--as she shrank
instinctively--"I'm not going to talk about it--I know you'd rather not.
Condolence platitudes were never in my line. But my pal's troubles are
mine--just as she once made mine hers."

Jane Crab's opinions were enunciated without fear or favour, and, in
defiance of public opinion, she took her stand on the side of the sinner
and maintained it unwaveringly.

"Well, Miss Sara," she affirmed, "unless you've proof as strong as 'Oly
Writ, as they say, I'd believe naught against Mr. Trent. Bluff and 'ard
he may be in 'is manner, but after the way he conducted himself the
night Miss Molly ran away, I'll never think no ill of 'im, not if it was
ever so!"

Sara smiled drearily.

"I wish I could feel as you do, Jane dear. But--Mrs. Durward _knows_."

"Mrs. Durward! Huh! One of them tigris women I calls 'er," retorted
Jane, who had formed her opinion with lightning rapidity when Elisabeth
made a farewell visit to Sunnyside before leaving Monkshaven. "Not
but what you can't help liking her, neither," went on Jane judicially.
"There's something good in the woman, for all she looks at you like
a cat who thinks you're after stealing her kittens. But there! As the
doctor--bless the man!--always says, there's good in everybody if so be
you'll look for it. Only I'd as lief think that Mrs. Durward was somehow
scared-like--too almighty scared to be her natchral self, savin' now and
again when she forgets."

To Mrs. Selwyn, the breaking off of Sara's engagement, and the manner
of it, signified very little. She watched the panorama of other people's
lives unfold with considerably less sympathetic concern than that with
which one follows the ups and downs that befall the characters in a
cinema drama, since they were altogether outside the radius of that
central topic of unfailing interest--herself.

The only way in which recent events impinged upon her life was in so far
as the rupture of Sara's engagement would probably mean the indefinite
prolongation of her stay at Sunnyside, which