“Yes you can, mother.  Write and put it off.”

“Write?  What could I write?  To-day is Tuesday, and they all arrive on Friday.  What excuse can I make at the last moment?  And how can a birthday be put off?  My dearest boy, I simply can’t.”  And Lady Shuttleworth, the sensible, the cheery, the resourceful, the perennially brave, wrung her hands and began quite helplessly to cry.

This unusual and pitiful sight at once conquered Tussie.  For a moment he stood aghast; then his arms were round his mother, and he promised everything she wanted.  What he said to her besides and what she sobbed back to him I shall not tell.  They never spoke of it again; but for years they both looked back to it, that precious moment of clinging together with bursting hearts, her old cheek against his young one, her tears on his face, as to one of the most acutely sweet, acutely, painfully, tender experiences of their joint lives.

It will be conceded that Priscilla had achieved a good deal in the one week that had passed since she laid aside her high estate and stepped down among ordinary people for the purpose of being and doing good.  She had brought violent discord into a hitherto peaceful vicarage, thwarted the hopes of a mother, been the cause of a bitter quarrel between her and her son, brought out by her mysteriousness a prying tendency in the son that might have gone on sleeping for ever, entirely upset the amiable Tussie’s life by rending him asunder with a love as strong as it was necessarily hopeless, made his mother anxious and unhappy, and, what was perhaps the greatest achievement of all, actually succeeded in making that mother cry.  For of course Priscilla was the ultimate cause of these unusual tears, as Lady Shuttleworth very well knew.  Lady Shuttleworth was the deceased Sir Augustus’s second wife, had married him when she was over forty and well out of the crying stage, which in the busy does not last beyond childhood, had lost him soon after Tussie’s birth, had cried copiously and most properly at his funeral, and had not cried since.  It was then undoubtedly a great achievement on the part of the young lady from nowhere, this wringing of tears out of eyes that had been dry for one and twenty years.  But the list of what Priscilla had done does not end with this havoc among mothers.  Had she not interrupted the decent course of Mrs. Jones’s dying, and snatched her back to a hankering after the unfit?  Had she not taught the entire village to break the Sabbath?  Had she not made all its children either sick or cross under the pretence of giving them a treat?  On the Monday she did something else that was equally well-meaning, and yet, as I shall presently relate, of disastrous consequences:  she went round the village from cottage to cottage making friends with the children’s mothers and leaving behind her, wherever she went, little presents of money.  She had found money so extraordinarily efficacious in the comforting of Mrs. Jones that before