for the masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact.  Jane acquiesced, having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition—­a passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on her a pain and a burden.  The name of Mattock gave her horrors.  She spoke of it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become a peer.  Never was there such a name to smell of the soil.  She declared her incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock.  Her own one fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked her to be claimed by him.  But for John and Jane the index of Providence pointed a brighter passage through life.  They had only to conquer the weakness native to them—­the dreadful tendency downward.  They had, in the spiritual sense, frail hearts.  The girl had been secretive about the early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence and her prospects:—­hence this Laundry business! a clear sign of some internal disappointment.  The boy, however, had betrayed himself in his mother’s days, when it required all her influence and his father’s authority, with proof positive of the woman’s unworthiness, to rescue him from immediate disaster.

Mrs. Lackstraw’s confidences on the theme of the family she watched over were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls and pheasants at her farm.  She dealt them out in exclamations, as much as telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding the unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry.  The confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors one after another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as not every Irishman would have been.  A service of six months to the secretaryship established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer species:  not much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman, and still impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.

The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the Mattock family.  It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had won their private esteem.  They are not willingly suspicious:  it agitates their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery of seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock:  for in this admiration of virtues that are so necessary