"The lady raised her calm, proud head,
     Though her tears fell one by one: 
     ’Life counts not hours by joys or pangs,
     But just by duties done.

    "And when I lie in the green kirk-yard,
     With the mould upon my breast,
     Say not that “She did well or ill,”
     Only, “She did her best."’"

A day or two after this, Christian, returning from her daily walk, which was now brief enough, and never beyond the college precincts, met a strange face at the Lodge door—­that is, a face not exactly strange; she seemed to have seen it before, but could not recollect how or where.  Then she recalled it as that of a young daily governess, her predecessor at the Fergusons’, who had left them “to better herself,” as she said—­and decidedly to the bettering of her pupils.

Miss Susan Bennett—­as Christian had soon discovered, both pupils and parents being very loquacious on the subject—­was one of those governesses whom one meets in hopeless numbers among the middle-class families—­girls, daughters of clerks or petty shopkeepers, above domestic service, and ashamed or afraid of any other occupation, which, indeed, is only too difficult to be found, whereby half-educated or not particularly clever young women may earn their bread.  They therefore take to teaching as “genteel,” and as being rather an elevation than not from the class in which they were born.  Obliged to work, though they would probably rather be idle, they consider governessing the easiest kind of work, and use it only as a means to an end which, if they have pretty faces and tolerable manners, is—­human nature being weak, and life only too hard, poor girls!—­most probably matrimony.

But governesses, pursuing their calling on this principle, are the dead-weight which drags down their whole class.  Half educated, lazy, unconscientious, with neither the working faculty of a common servant, nor the tastes and feelings of a lady, they do harm wherever they go; they neither win respect nor deserve it; and the best thing that could befall them would be to be swept down, by hundreds, a step lower in the scale of society—­made to use their hands instead of their heads, or, at any rate, to learn themselves instead of attempting to teach others.

Christian—­who, though chiefly self-taught, except in music, was a well-educated woman, and a most conscientious teacher—­had been caused a world of trouble in undoing what her predecessor had done; and in the few times that the little Fergusons had met in the street their former instructress, who was a very good-looking and showy girl, she had not been too favorably impressed with Miss Bennett.  But when she saw her coming out of the Lodge door, rather shabbier than beforetime, the March wind whistling through her thin, tawdry shawl, and making her pretty face look pinched and blue, Mrs. Grey, contrasting the comforts of her own life with that of the poor governess, felt compassionately towards her so much so, that, though wondering what could possibly be her business at the Lodge, she assumed the mistress’s kindly part, and bowed to her in passing which Miss Bennett was in too great a hurry either to notice or return.