great city tradesmen, stand, of course, on far higher ground, and are often far better educated, and more high-minded, than the fine ladies, their parents’ customers.  But, till some better plan of education than the boarding-school is devised for them; till our towns shall see something like in kind to, though sounder and soberer in quality than, the high schools of America; till in country villages the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers’ and tradesmen’s daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children, and will yield a far richer return for their labour, though the one need not interfere with the other; so long will England be full of Miss Heales; fated, when they marry, to bring up sons and daughters as sordid and unwholesome as their mothers.

Tom worked all that day in and out of the Pentremochyn cottages, noting down nuisances and dilapidations:  but his head was full of other thoughts; for he had received, the evening before, news which was to him very important, for more reasons than one.

The longer he stayed at Aberalva, the longer he felt inclined to stay.  The strange attraction of Grace had, as we have seen, something to do with his purpose:  but he saw, too, a good opening for one of those country practices, in which he seemed more and more likely to end.  At his native Whitbury, he knew, there was no room for a fresh medical man; and gradually he was making up his mind to settle at Aberalva; to buy out Heale, either with his own money (if he recovered it), or with money borrowed from Mark; to bring his father down to live with him, and in that pleasant wild western place, fold his wings after all his wanderings.  And therefore certain news which he had obtained the night before was very valuable to him, in that it put a fresh person into his power, and might, if cunningly used, give him a hold upon the ruling family of the place, and on Lord Scoutbush himself.  He had found out that Lucia and Elsley were unhappy together; and found out, too, a little more than was there to find.  He could not, of course, be a month among the gossips of Aberalva, without hearing hints that the great folks at the court did not always keep their tempers; for, of family jars, as of everything else on earth, the great and just law stands true:—­“What you do in the closet, shall be proclaimed on the housetop.”

But the gossips of Aberalva, as women are too often wont to do, had altogether taken the man’s side in the quarrel.  The reason was, I suppose, that Lucia, conscious of having fallen somewhat in rank, “held up her head” to Mrs. Trebooze and Mrs. Heale (as they themselves expressed it), and to various other little notabilities of the neighbourhood, rather more than she would have done had she married a man of her own class.  She was afraid that they might boast of being intimate with her; that they might take to advising and patronising her as an inexperienced