MABEL'S PROGRESS,
BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUNT MARGARET'S TROUBLE."

BOOK I.
CHAPTER III. THE SAXELBYS.

MABEL EARNSHAW'S mother had married a
second time. Her present husband, Mabel's
step-father, was a Mr. Saxelby; and by him
she had one child, a little boy of three years old.
Mr. Saxelby was chief clerk—he said secretary,
—to the flourishing company which supplied
Hammerham with gas. He was a very
thoroughly efficient clerk, and had risen to his
present position in the company's employ,
through various gradations, until he had come
to be a very much trusted and influential
personage in nearly all their transactions. He
earned a good salary, and, some people thought,
had saved money; others maintained that he
lived fully up to his income. He had met Mrs.
Earnshaw—then a very pretty widow—at a
Welsh watering-place, some five years before
the date of my story. She was living as
companion to a very cross and disagreeable old
lady, who combined those attributes with
remarkably strong and uncompromising low-
church views on religion. She tortured poor,
meek, weak, pretty Mrs. Earnshaw with her
temper, and frightened her with her doctrine.
So when Mr. Saxelby—then a staid bachelor of
two-and-forty—fell in love with and proposed to
her, the poor woman was grateful to him in
proportion to the joy she felt at the idea of
escaping from her present lot, and accepted
him without hesitation. Her little girl was
staying with some relatives of her late father.
Very little was ever said about these relatives
after Mrs. Earnshaw's second marriage; but
Mr. Saxelby at once sent for the child, and had
her to live in his own house. He behaved well
to Mabel on the whole, and was a kind husband
to her mother. But between him and his step-
daughter, much sympathy was impossible.
Benjamin Saxelby's character was rigid, his
intellect narrow, his education very limited. His
was the intolerant ignorance which is so
hopeless to deal with, because it can conceive
nothing beyond the circumscribed range within
its ken, and takes its own horizon for the
boundary of the universe. He had a standard
of duty, to which—in justice it must be said—
he conscientiously endeavoured to adhere. But
unfortunately, this included very few qualities
that are calculated to call forth strong attachment.
And it was beyond Mr. Saxelby's
mental possibilities to perceive that when
Mabel's moral measurement failed to coincide
accurately with his standard, it was occasionally
because she was above, and not below, it. His
wife's weaker and more plastic nature
accommodated itself more easily to his opinions and
prejudices. Besides, all the love of which he was
capable was given to her and to her boy. And
if there exist any natures in which real love
does not awaken an answering affection, Mrs.
Saxelby's was not one of them. She was very
grateful, very gentle, very humble, and a little
selfish, with the soft selfishness that springs
from weakness and indolence. Mabel was
tenderly attached to her mother, towards whom she
assumed at times a sort of protecting air; but
she cherished a secret worship for her dead
father's memory: crediting him with many more
high and noble qualities than he had ever
possessed, and clinging passionately to those who
belonged to his blood. Mabel had been too
young to form any real estimate of her father's
character, for he died when she was but six
years old. But she had thought of him, and
spoken of him, until she persuaded herself that
she retained a vivid remembrance of her dead
parent.

The Saxelby household was by no means an
unhappy one. Mabel had too much sweetness
of nature, and clearness of mind to grudge her
mother the happiness and comfort she derived
from her second marriage. And when the baby-
brother arrived, she took the little fellow into
her warm young heart, and loved him with a
rich abundance of sisterly affection. There was
one point, and one only, on which Mabel felt
any bitterness or resentment towards her step-
father, and this point they both tacitly agreed
to avoid. The grievance which rankled in
Mabel's mind arose from the mode in which she
had been withdrawn from the protection of her
father's relatives; and the absolute prohibition
which Mr. Saxelby commanded his wife to lay
on her holding any communication with them,
from the time she left their roof for his. Mabel
had been a little girl of eleven at the period of
her mother's second marriage, and the five
years that had since passed had served to
obliterate from her mind in a great degree the