despairing during the next few days--an
unpromising, unfortunate mood for a woman who had not been married
six weeks. From her parents she concealed everything. They had been
amongst the few acquaintances of Heddegan who knew nothing of his
secret, and were indignant enough when they saw such a ready-made
household foisted upon their only child. But she would not support
them in their remonstrances.

'No, you don't yet know all,' she said.

Thus Baptista had sense enough to see the retributive fairness of
this issue. For some time, whenever conversation arose between her and
Heddegan, which was not often, she always said, 'I am miserable, and
you know it. Yet I don't wish things to be otherwise.'

But one day when he asked, 'How do you like 'em now?' her answer was
unexpected. 'Much better than I did,' she said, quietly. 'I may like
them very much some day.'

This was the beginning of a serener season for the chastened spirit of
Baptista Heddegan. She had, in truth, discovered, underneath the
crust of uncouthness and meagre articulation which was due to their
Troglodytean existence, that her unwelcomed daughters had natures that
were unselfish almost to sublimity. The harsh discipline accorded to
their young lives before their mother's wrong had been righted, had
operated less to crush them than to lift them above all personal
ambition. They considered the world and its contents in a purely
objective way, and their own lot seemed only to affect them as that of
certain human beings among the rest, whose troubles they knew rather
than suffered.

This was such an entirely new way of regarding life to a woman of
Baptista's nature, that her attention, from being first arrested
by it, became deeply interested. By imperceptible pulses her heart
expanded in sympathy with theirs. The sentences of her tragi-comedy,
her life, confused till now, became clearer daily. That in humanity,
as exemplified by these girls, there was nothing to dislike, but
infinitely much to pity, she learnt with the lapse of each week in
their company. She grew to like the girls of unpromising exterior, and
from liking she got to love them; till they formed an unexpected point
of junction between her own and her husband's interests, generating a
sterling friendship at least, between a pair in whose existence there
had threatened to be neither friendship nor love.

_George Moore_

A FAITHFUL HEART

(_The Speaker_, 16 April 1892)

Part