der her long
widow's veil. She visits the poor with her sister, and gives charities,
but she will have no beggarly tricks, and can pick out a hypocrite at
his first whining, howsoever clever he may be. One came to her last
week with a lying tale of having loved the old Earl Dunstanwolde, and
been his pensioner for years. And to see her mark the weak points of
his story, and to hear the wit with which she questioned him until he
broke down affrighted, was a thing to marvel at.

"'Think you,' she said, 'that I will let knaves trade on my lord's
goodness, and play tricks in his name? You shall all see. In the
stocks you shall sit and repent it--a warning to other rascals.'"

But in the miserable, long-neglected village of Wildairs she did such
deeds as made her remembered to the end of many lives. No village was
in worse case than this had been for years, as might well be expected.
Falling walls, rotting thatches, dirt and wretchedness were to be seen
on all sides; cottages were broken-paned and noisome, men and women who
should have been hale were drawn with rheumatism from mouldering
dampness, or sodden with drink and idleness; children who should have
been rosy and clean and studying their horn books, at the dame school,
were little, dirty, evil, brutal things.

"And no blame of theirs, but yours," said my lady to her father.

"Thou didst not complain in days gone by, Clo," said Sir Jeoffry, "but
swore at them roundly when they ran in thy horse's way as thou went at
gallop through the village, and called the men and women lousy pigs who
should be whipt."

"Did I?" said her ladyship, looking at him with large eyes. "Ay, that I
did. In those days surely I was mad and blind."

"Wildairs village is no credit to its owner," grumbled Sir Jeoffry.
"Wherefore should it be? I am a poor man--I can do naught for it."

"I can," said my Lady Dunstanwolde.

And so she did, but at first when she entered the tumbledown cottages,
looking so tall, a black figure in her sweeping draperies and widow's
veil, the people were more than half affrighted. But soon she won them
from their terror with her own strange power, and they found that she
was no longer the wild young lady who had dashed through their hamlet
in hunting garb, her dogs following her, and the glance of her black
eyes and the sound of her mocking laugh things to flee before. Her eyes
had grown kind, and she had a way none could resist, and showed a
singular knowledge