ho was gentle and obedient, not through any timidity or
limpness of character, but because she considered it her duty to
be gentle and obedient--was to be cast aside and have her tenderest
feelings outraged and wounded for the sake of an unscrupulous,
shallow-brained woman of fashion, who was not fit to be Sheila's
waiting-maid. Ingram had never seen Mrs. Lorraine, but he had formed
his own opinion of her. The opinion, based upon nothing, was wholly
wrong, but it served to increase, if that were possible, his sympathy
with Sheila, and his resolve to interfere on her behalf at whatever
cost.

"Sheila," he said, gravely putting his hand on her shoulder as if she
were still the little girl who used to run wild with him about the
Borva rocks, "you are a good woman."

He added to himself that Lavender knew little of the value of the wife
he had got, but he dared not say that to Sheila, who would suffer no
imputation against her husband to be uttered in her presence, however
true it might be, or however much she had cause to know it to be true.

"And, after all," he said in a lighter voice, "I think I can do
something to mend all this. I will say for Frank Lavender that he is a
thoroughly good fellow at heart, and that when you appeal to him, and
put things fairly before him, and show him what he ought to do, there
is not a more honorable and straightforward man in the world. He has
been forgetful, Sheila. He has been led away by these people, you
know, and has not been aware of what you were suffering. When I put
the matter before him, you will see it will be all right; and I hope
to persuade him to give up this constant idling and take to his work,
and have something to live for. I wish you and I together could get
him to go away from London altogether--get him to take to serious
landscape painting on some wild coast--the Galway coast, for example."

"Why not the Lewis?" said Sheila, her heart turning to the North as
naturally as the needle.

"Or the Lewis. And I should like you and him to live away from hotels
and luxuries, and all such things; and he would work all day, and you
would do the cooking in some small cottage you could rent, you know."

"You make me so happy in thinking of that," she said, with her eyes
growing wet again.

"And why should he not do so? There is nothing romantic or idyllic
about it, but a good, wholesome, plain sort of life, that is likely to
make an honest painter of him, and bring both