“Never mind.  Perhaps by this very act he is earning permission to come back again, a wiser and a more useful man.”

“How then?”

“Is he not making friends with angels who always behold our Father’s face?  At least he is showing capabilities of good, which God gave; and which therefore God will never waste.”

“Now, shall I sing you another song?”

“Oh yes, please!” rose from a dozen little mouths.

“You must not be troublesome to his lordship,” says Grace.

“Oh no, I like it.  I’ll sing them one more song, and then—­I want to speak to you, Miss Harvey.”

Grace curtsied, blushed, and shook all over.  What could Lord Scoutbush want to say to her?

That indeed was not very easy to discover at first; for Scoutbush felt so strongly the oddity of taking a pretty young woman into his counsel on a question of sanitary reform, that he felt mightily inclined to laugh, and began beating about the bush, in a sufficiently confused fashion.

“Well, Miss Harvey, I am exceedingly pleased with—­with what I have seen of the school—­that is, what my sister tells, and the clergyman—­”

“The clergyman?” thought Grace, surprised, as she well might be, at what was entirely an impromptu invention of his lordship’s.

“And—­and—­there is ten pounds toward the school, and—­and, I will give an annual subscription the same amount.”

“Mr. Headley receives the subscriptions, my lord,” said Grace, drawing back from the proffered note.

“Of course,” quoth Scoutbush, trusting again to an impromptu:  “but this is for yourself—­a small mark of our sense of your—­your usefulness.”

If any one has expected that Grace is about to conduct herself, during this interview, in any wise like a prophetess, tragedy queen, or other exalted personage; to stand upon her native independence, and scorning the bounty of an aristocrat, to read the said aristocrat a lecture on his duties and responsibilities, as landlord of Aberalva town; then will that person be altogether disappointed.  It would have looked very well, doubtless:  but it would have been equally untrue to Grace’s womanhood, and to her notions of Christianity.  Whether all men were or were not equal in the sight of Heaven, was a notion which, had never crossed her mind.  She knew that they would all be equal in heaven, and that was enough for her.  Meanwhile, she found lords and ladies on earth, and seeing no open sin in the fact of their being richer and more powerful than she was, she supposed that God had put them where they were; and she accepted them simply as facts of His kingdom.  Of course they had their duties, as every one has:  but what they were she did not know, or care to know.  To their own master they stood or fell; her business was with her own duties, and with her own class, whose good and evil she understood by practical experience.  So when a live lord made his appearance in her school,