Mrs. Lockwood's words, and be repulsed
by it.

"I think—" said Maud, gently, and turning
her pale face full on Mrs. Lockwood:
"I am young and inexperienced I know,
but I do think that having loved one suffering
person very much should make us tender
to other sufferers."

"Sufferers!" repeated Mrs. Lockwood,
with a cold contempt, and closed her mouth
rigidly when she had spoken.

"Yes," answered Maud, firmly. The
colour rose very faintly in her cheek and her
blue eyes shone. "My unhappy friend is
a sufferer. Not the less a sufferer because
there is truth in some of the words you
have applied to her. Pride and ambition
do not soften such a fall as hers."

Again Maud could not help perceiving
that Mrs. Lockwood was balancing
Veronica's fate against the fate of the betrayed
young girl: and that she derived a strange
satisfaction from the suggestion that
Veronica's haughty spirit could be tortured
by humiliation.

"There would be a grain of something
like justice in that," said Zillah, under her
breath.

Maud withdrew with a pained feeling.
Her mind had at first been relieved by the
mere fact of uttering the name of one
who dwelt so constantly in her thoughts.
But Mrs. Lockwood's manner had so
repulsed her that she inwardly resolved
never again to approach the subject of
Veronica's fate in speaking to her. But
to her surprise, the topic seemed to have
a mysterious attraction for Mrs. Lockwood.
Whenever she found herself alone
with Maud, she was sure, sooner or later
to come round to it.

Once she said, after a long pause of
silence during which her fingers were
busied with needlework and her eyes cast
down on it, "If that poor young girl—she
is dead now, you know—could have had
a friend like you, Miss Desmond, years
and years ago, it might have gone
differently with her. It would have given her
courage to know that such a pure-hearted
woman pitied rather than blamed her."

"I should think all honest hearts must
be filled with compassion at her story,"
answered Maud, in a low voice.

"Do you think a man's heart would be?
Do you think that, for instance, my—
my son's would be?"

"Surely! Can you doubt it?"

"Poor girl! She was so ignorant of
the world! She knew there was a great
gulf between her and such as you are.
She had never lived with good people.
They were as distant from her as the
inhabitants of the moon might be. If she
had had a friend like you, Miss Desmond,
that poor girl who is dead, it would have
given her courage, and it might have gone
differently with her."

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE NORTH. PETERBOROUGH AND FOTHERINGAY.

THE crow, leaving a sluggish express
train behind him (a mere tortoise in the
race) with one contemptuous flap of his
jet black wings, alights on one of the
massy grey western towers of Peterborough
Cathedral. From above those three great
cavernous porches that give shadow to the
old west front, he looks over a sea of green
pasture and the cane-coloured stubble and
rich chocolate-brown arable over which
William and his mailed conquerors, chanting
of Roland and Roncesvalles, of proud
Paynim and Christian champions "militant
here on earth," and fresh from scorched
and bleeding Yorkshire and Durham, bore
down on Ely, whose fens and morasses
the Saxons still held against the savage
Norman. Hereward, the son of the Saxon
lord of Baurn, in Lincolnshire, had built a
stockade in the Island of Ely, where he
erected his standard and defied the Norman
bowmen. An exile in Flanders, banished
in youth for treasonable turbulence by
Edward the Confessor, Hereward, on learning
that his father was dead, and that a Norman
robber had expelled his mother from the
fair lands of Baurn, returned to England,
rallied his warlike tenantry, drove out the
intruder, and organised a small guerilla
army—like the stout-hearted Saxon
Garibaldi that he was. His uncle Brand, abbot
of Peterborough, knighted the brave chieftain.
At Brand's death in 1069,
William gave the abbey (as dangerous a gift
as a cask of gunpowder) to Turold, a
foreign monk, who rode into Northamptonshire
in the centre of one hundred and sixty
spearmen. It was an ill-omened moment,
for a red light rose in the northern sky
at the new abbot's approach. That fire
arose from the flaming town of
Peterborough. The Danes had poured down from
the Humber to the west, and Sbern their
chief had joined Hereward, who was sweeping
now like a resistless deluge over the
marsh country. The abbey was burnt,
the golden chalices and patens melted and
gone, before Turold, pale and scared, rode