When Freda began to assist Mrs Jones in her parish work, and threw herself, heart and soul, into the ragged school, they met of necessity very frequently.  Freda was so studiously polite in her manners to him, and so careful to avoid every subject that would recall their old relations at Glanyravon, that he gradually felt more at his ease with her, and it ended by his resuming his old, friendly intercourse with Mr and Mrs Jones.  But Freda knew well that, in spite of her best efforts to propitiate him, he never forgot those words, ’Do you know who I am, and who you are?’ He was always gentlemanlike, always kind, always ready to do anything she asked him, but he never relaxed the somewhat formal respect of his manner.  In society, he was quite different with every one else to what he was with her.  With the Perrys he was as much at ease as if he were their own son; and they seemed almost to consider him as such.  At his rector’s he was the life of their little circle, and might have been, Freda shrewdly suspected, united to it by a link closer than that of curate, had he so chosen; for there was a very pretty daughter who evidently looked upon him with favourable eyes.  Amongst the respectable portion of his flock he was a general favourite, and all the young ladies, as young ladies will, worked with and for him; not only in the matter of schools, but in slippers and purses.  What was still more clear and satisfactory to Freda was, that he made way amongst the miserable poor.

The ragged school children loved him, and through them, he got at the hearts of some of their degraded parents.  His seemed a labour of love with every one but her.  She received his marked politeness and nothing more.  But he interested her daily.  Some new trait of character would break out—­some little touch of deep feeling—­some symptom of a highly sensitive nature, which told her how much he must have felt her cutting words.  He was proud, too, and she liked him for it, although she was striving to humble her own pride.  What would she not have given to have recalled those words!  The Rowland Prothero of London, esteemed and loved by the wise and good, for his unpretending but strenuous parochial labours, his clear, forcible, but very simple preaching—­was to her quite a different person from him of Glanyravon Farm, the son of her father’s tenant.  In short they were no longer identical.  As she was no longer the heiress of Glanyravon, but simply Miss Gwynne, Mrs. Jones’ friend—­so he was Mr. Rowland Prothero, a respectable and respected London clergyman.

And these are the relations under which they appear, sitting near one another over the accounts of the ragged school, which Freda has undertaken to keep.

‘I think there is a slight fault here, Miss Gwynne,’ he says, pointing out an error in calculation.

’Of course, I never had a head for figures, and Mrs. Jones could never get me to do my sums.’

’Still, the account is quite right in the main, the errors were in the adding up, and it is rightly balanced.’