‘That will do,’ said Lady Shale decisively.  ’I will merely say that the sooner you leave the lodge the better; and that you will do well never again to pass the gates of the Hall.  You may go.’

Miss Rockett withdrew.  Outside, the footman was awaiting her.  He looked at her with a grin, and asked in an undertone, ‘Any good?’ But May, to whom this was the last blow, rushed past him, lost herself in corridors, ran wildly hither and thither, tears streaming from her eyes, and was at length guided by a maidservant into the outer air.  Fleeing she cared not whither, she came at length into a still corner of the park, and there, hidden amid trees, watched only by birds and rabbits, she wept out the bitterness of her soul.

By an evening train she returned to London, not having confessed to her family what she had done, and suffering still from some uncertainty as to the result.  A day or two later Betsy wrote to her the happy news that the sentence of expulsion was withdrawn, and peace reigned once more in the ivy-covered lodge.  By that time Miss Rockett had all but recovered her self-respect, and was so busy in her secretaryship that she could only scribble a line of congratulation.  She felt that she had done rather a meritorious thing, but, for the first time in her life, did not care to boast of it.

THE RIDING-WHIP

It was not easy for Mr. Daffy to leave his shop for the whole day, but an urgent affair called him to London, and he breakfasted early in order to catch the 8.30 train.  On account of his asthma he had to allow himself plenty of time for the walk to the station; and all would have been well, but that, just as he was polishing his silk hat and giving final directions to his assistant, in stepped a customer, who came to grumble about the fit of a new coat.  Ten good minutes were thus consumed, and with a painful glance at his watch the breathless tailor at length started.  The walk was uphill; the sun was already powerful; Mr. Daffy reached the station with dripping forehead and panting as if his sides would burst.  There stood the train; he had barely time to take his ticket and to rush across the platform.  As a porter slammed the carriage-door behind him, he sank upon the seat in a lamentable condition, gasping, coughing, writhing; his eyes all but started from his head, and his respectable top-hat tumbled to the floor, where unconsciously he gave it a kick.  A grotesque and distressing sight.

Only one person beheld it, and this, as it happened, a friend of Mr. Daffy’s.  In the far corner sat a large, ruddy-cheeked man, whose eye rested upon the sufferer with a look of greeting disturbed by compassion.  Mr. Lott, a timber-merchant of this town, was in every sense of the word a more flourishing man than the asthmatic tailor; his six-feet-something of sound flesh and muscle, his ripe sunburnt complexion, his attitude of eupeptic and broad-chested ease, left