"Shall I tell you ?" she said in a clear metallic voice. "Take back the management of your own affairs; forbid him to use your money as he does for the spread of infidelity; make him an allowance, and have a deed of separation. You will never be a true Christian or a good churchwoman, Hermione, until you do all this; and Superior knows this as well as I do."

"No, I cannot do all this. Poor Richard!" said Hermione.
Mrs. Everett let her hands fall.

"Then you can never hope to go to heaven," she said. "You prefer the creature to the Creator, and sensual passion to holiness and faith. Your love for your husband is simply sensuality and a shameful sin, call it what you will."

"You do not know what you are saying," cried Hermione, strongly agitated.

"I think I do," said Mrs. Everett in a superior kind of way. "It is you, poor thing, who do not know what you feel! Neither I nor Superior will ever think differently until you take your courage in both hands and do as I say-and as he says too :-rid the place of this infamous atheism which your husband teaches, and free yourself from the declared enemy of the Church and your priest. There is no second way. It is this, or consenting with sinners and making yourself responsible for their sin. There! don't cry! Tears do no good unless they are tears of repentance; and you are only crying because you are weak and worried and cannot make up your mind to do bravely what is right."

She went to her and kissed the grieving woman as if she had been a child.

"I have said enough for the present," she thought, watching her. "Things must go gently."

After a moment she spoke again.

"You poor darling!" she said; "I am so sorry to make you unhappy. But I must, until I make you good. Don't fret any more just now. Put on your bonnet and come with me to see dear Superior. He will comfort you and tell you that I am right."

"I don't see how that will comfort me," said Hermione irritably. At this moment Mrs. Everett was the most hateful person in all creation to her whom she had been appointed to guide and befriend.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE TERRORS OF JUDGMENT.

MR. LASCELLES and Mrs. Edith Everett stood by the parting of the ways, she to return to the tedium of her duennaship at the Abbey, he to the discomfort of his bereaved Vicarage; both a little rasped by the unpleasant conditions of the present moment, but drawn closer together by the common need of sympathy rather than driven apart into unfriendliness because of irritated nerves and ruffled temper. They had been talking of many things connected with the parish, and had touched at last on the relations of Hermione with her husband, and how far she might be counted on in the final. struggle which Mr. Lascelles was preparing to make. Both knew that she was profoundly impressed with faith and fear-that she believed in the truth of Christianity and was afraid of the power of the Church; but both knew also that her love for her husband was not dead, and that since Virginia's defection it had undergone an undeniable revival; and both were anxiously watching the alternate rise and fall of these two antagonistic forces, and speculating as to which would finally overcome.

"Do you think she will be permanently influenced for good?— you see so much more of her than I do!" said Mr. Lascelles, careful not to show too much personal interest in Hermione.

Well, you see, she is so weak!" replied the pretty woman's friend and guide, speaking with tranquil contempt. "There is no certainty with such people; and as for her, you never know where to have her. You think you have brought her to a right view of things one day, and the next she has taken a new start and is as far off as ever. She is terribly fatiguing. I hope she is worth all the trouble taken about her!"

"She is very impressionable," said Mr. Lascelles, steering between praise and blame.

"That is a meek way of putting it, Superior. I should call her miserably weak," returned Mrs. Everett, still with that same calm, mocking contempt. It was her method of asserting her own superiority.

"Her will has been crushed so long. It is the paralysis of disuse," said the vicar, wishing to be charitable if just, yet not caring to champion Hermione Fullerton too warmly to Mrs. Everett. Those hazel eyes of hers were not pleasant to meet when they

looked as if they were reading the secret writing of the soul;-and somewhat despising the literature.

"She need not have been crushed. She need not have given in to that vile husband of hers if she had not liked it," she said. "Really, no excuses are to be made for her, Superior! She is just a child with nice manners and a pretty face and nothing whatever in her. When you have said that she is kind-hearted you have said all for her that you can. Of mind she has not a trace."

"You, at least, will not strain the truth for charity. I honour your uncompromising spirit," said Mr. Lascelles, with a courtly smile. "No," she answered, ignoring the sting and accepting the blandishment. "It is never my way to strain the truth for false charity. I like to see things as they are, and to speak of them as I see them.” "Yet submissiveness has its uses, my dear friend," he said pleasantly.

"I am not clever enough to see them in the case of Mrs. Fullerton," she answered. "Jelly-fish and that dreadful protoplasm have their uses too, I suppose; but I confess I do not know what they are."

"The

"As an agent inspired by others," said Mr. Lascelles. docility which has made Mrs. Fullerton submit so readily to her husband will make her as obedient to the Church."

Mrs. Everett looked into vacancy and put on, as she could do at will, a perfectly stolid, stupid, mindless look.

"She believes that is the great thing gained," continued Mr. Lascelles, and then waited for an answer.

66

But she is one of those emotional people who require so much personal influence!" she said. "It is not as if she had any intellect, any will, any force that could be trusted to. She has to be always held in hand-always guided."

"She has that influence in Direction," replied Hermione's confessor demurely.

"To forget everything that she has promised as soon as she is at home!" retorted Mrs. Everett cruelly. "She must be an enormous trouble to you, Superior, if she is honest."

"I allow that. She does give me infinitely more trouble than some others whom I could name-some others who are at once stronger and yet more submissive.”

The vicar smiled as he said this, his smile giving his words their application and meaning.

Mrs. Everett smiled too, and adjusted her bonnet-strings with the automatic coquetry of a woman who, though she knows that she is not

beautiful, also knows herself admired. Truly she had no cause to fear Hermione! There was no rivalry here that should make her afraid. Blunt nose; small, greenish, hazel eyes; a face that had not one redeeming feature save its transparent skin, on the one side-on the other loveliness as fresh and fragrant now as at eighteen ; but still no rivalry that should make her afraid! For had she not brains by which she was enabled to be a clever man's still cleverer manipulator as well as coadjutor, while Hermione was but a child to be petted and cared for-loved if you will and admired—but neither trusted to in moments of difficulty nor confided in when clear counsel was needed—a mere doll-wife, dainty, sweet, caressing, loving;—and that was all! With such a man as Superior brains would count for more than beauty, and sweetness was less necessary than sense. He wanted some one by his side who had intelligence enough to understand his own mind and act with independent accord-strengthening his hands while freeing him from the trouble of direction; not a mere machine, however pretty, to work when guided but sure to fall into disorder if left to itself. No; Mrs. Everett saw nothing to be afraid of and much to hope for. But she must not let Superior understand her too clearly, and she must manage things in her own way; which was not exactly that in vogue at Crossholme.

"Some men like troublesome women," she said.

"Do they?" asked Mr. Lascelles with affected innocence of inquiry.

"Yes; pretty little creatures whose inferiority is a perpetual witness of their own supremacy," she said. "It gratifies their selflove to feel themselves always on a pedestal, and to see the relative silliness of the dear little things!"

"So! And who are these men?" he asked, still with that innocent air as of one wanting to know.

"Well, I do not think that you are one, Superior!" said Mrs. Everett with frank confession. "You are too wise to like the dangerous honour of being the head-centre of an association of pretty simpletons. You would feel more in your right place if surrounded by those who understood and could help you as interpreters of your mind, rather than by mere dummies acting only according to minute orders; is it not so?"

"Surely!" said Mr. Lascelles with a peculiar smile. "But where are such to be found? So few women understand the deeper thoughts of men! Some supplement us," he added courteously; "but it is given to very few to really understand us."

"I know that, being one of the few," she said carelessly. "I do