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The Duchess of Trent would never call the little chamber which she used for her devotions an oratory, thinking that term savoured of Romanism. The furniture of the praying-closet was as downright and old-fashioned as its name. There was a little table against the wall, supporting a plain cross of silver, a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, a small book of devotions called Bogatzky’s “Golden Treasury,” containing portions of Scripture, with hymns and prayers for each day. An armchair and a kneeling-cushion were the only other articles in the closet, except on the walls, which were hung with a few illuminated texts of Scripture, and a fine engraving of one of Holman Hunt’s pictures. It was such a room as might have been used by the pious Countess of Huntingdon, or one of those saintly dames who kept alive the lamp of Evangelical Christianity through the days of the Regency.

Here the Duchess was accustomed to spend many hours in pious meditation. Her nature was inclined to the tenets of the Quakers, but, like the royal mistress whom she had formerly served, she deemed that questions of ecclesiastical forms and government were unimportant, provided they did not come between the soul and its Maker. Her horror of Romanism had its root in the natural strength of her character; she revolted from the devotional practices of that communion as a healthy man might revolt from the use of crutches. Her education had taught her to consider that the claims of the Roman Church were a deliberate imposture, but she was too charitable to think evil of the individual members of its priesthood. The great wave of medieval reaction which was now sweeping over the English Church, and in a lesser degree over the Nonconformist bodies, had passed her by. The ecclesiastical subtleties which had exercised the mind of Newman and his followers were meaningless to her. She lived, as she humbly believed, in direct communion with God, whose Holy Spirit afforded her what light was necessary to salvation, and the Sacraments she regarded as mere outward tokens of a spiritual allegiance.

Believing thus, her piety overflowed, not in the observance of fasts, nor in attendance at public services, but in works of benevolence. In the country parish where she had formerly lived she had discharged all the duties of a curate, except those connected with public worship. The cottagers believed in her more than in the Rector; on several occasions she had been asked to baptize some new-born infant whose little life seemed to be guttering out. Those of such children who survived were regarded as singularly blest, and their parents showed great reluctance to let the ceremony be repeated in the church with the proper forms. She had been in still greater request as a peacemaker; no quarrel ever outlived her interference in that office. Yet she never scolded the people, and seldom rebuked them. Her method was to take the causes of mutual offence upon herself, and ask forgiveness from each in turn. It became imprudent for her to speak severely to any of the villagers, even when rebuke was called for. She found out once that a drunkard whom she had sternly reproved for ill-treatment of his children was set upon in consequence by the entire village and beaten dangerously. Her removal to London was felt like death. The whole country-side was downcast. She arranged to keep up the payment of all her alms by the hands of the Rector, but this was not felt as a consolation. Half the population of the parish followed her on the day she went away from them, the mothers crying and holding up their babes to take a last look at her, the children silent and hanging their heads. The fathers at work in the fields cast down their tools as the carriage went by, and came and stood in the road, with bared heads, till it had disappeared.

Afterwards the Rector, himself a well-meaning but dull man, meeting one of the men on his way home, said that he was glad to see so much love shown by the people for her Grace.

The man stared at him.

“Us love she, sir? Why, that’s nought. ’Twere her as loved we, sir, better than us love each other.”

When the Duchess settled in her son’s London house, she sought at once for the spot where such service as hers was most needed. She did not apply to the minister of the parish in which Colonsay House was situated, lest, tempted by her great rank, he might exaggerate the claims of his own district, and perhaps push out some humbler worker. For though every Calvinist is something of a republican, and the Duchess of Trent made it a point of conscience not to set value on the title she bore, a wise prudence taught her never to forget the importance attached to it by others, and the unwholesome influence it was likely to have over a certain class of minds. She knew how to distinguish with perfect clearness between the courtship paid to her rank and the love which she inspired on her own account; in this respect again resembling the monarch who was her friend.

After a careful investigation, carried out quietly by herself, the Duchess chose for her sphere of charitable labour a district lying in the south of the Thames, between Lambeth and Westminster Bridges. Here, under the shadow of the Archbishop’s Palace, she found heathendom as utter as, and vice more rank than that the Church was sending out missionaries to cope with in China and Hindustan.

The Vicar of the parish in which this region was included, whose name was Dr. Coles, was a pious, learned, and zealous divine, but he was believed to construe his ordination vows according to a code of honour more Roman than English. The services at St. Jermyn’s bore little resemblance to those of a Protestant place of worship, and it was suspected that they were but the outward and visible signs of a still deeper cleavage between the Doctor’s private beliefs and those affirmed in the articles of religion which he had subscribed. The Vicarage was the resort of a great number of young men from the theological colleges, among whom the Vicar of St. Jermyn’s appeared to enjoy an authority not explained by his rank in the Church.

Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going about the slums of St. Jermyn’s.

The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm, or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own.

It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning after she had seen her son.

The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”

Beers Cooperage no longer retained any trace of the manufacture of casks and barrels which some departed cooper had doubtless carried on there in bygone days. It consisted of a row of half a dozen very small cottages, with still smaller enclosures in front, which looked as though they might once have been meant for gardens. A last reminder of the time when Beers Cooperage had considered itself to be in a rural neighbourhood lingered on the window-sills of some of these cottages, which were ornamented with miniature wooden railings and five-barred gates, a touch of rustic fancy of which the modern Londoner has become incapable. Yet though the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage could not have originated these quaint decorations, and had probably never seen the country sights they were meant to recall, they took a pathetic pride in possessing them, and as soon as one of the railings or gates showed signs of decay it was carefully repaired.

Who knows what influence such trifles have over all of us? It is certain that the dwellers in Beers Cooperage were generally quieter and more decent in their lives than most of their neighbours. One or two of them kept singing-birds, instead of terriers to kill rats with. The inmate of one house, a poor cripple, had even set himself resolutely to make his front garden a reality instead of a name, by planting a row of wallflowers, bought full-grown from a coster-monger, in what he evidently considered a bed. These plants, which perished periodically, and were regularly renewed, were regarded with reverence by the neighbours, and attracted pilgrims to view them from two or three streets away. But on the rare occasions when they burst into bloom of their own accord, no profane hand was allowed to come too near them. After being reverently smelled at a distance by the dwellers in the Cooperage, the blossoms were culled with anxious pride by their proprietor, and made into a nosegay for the Duchess, who carried them home with her, and set them on the table of her oratory. They were the only flowers ever seen on that simple altar.

There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags.

This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had threatened to wring the neck of any —— Protestant who came meddling inside his doors.

For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours. He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact length of time.

On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was amiss.

Several of the cottages showed broken windows, and in one or two places even the cherished gates and rails had been damaged or destroyed. A broken birdcage lay on the ground in the far corner of the yard beside the dog’s kennel. All the doors of the houses were closed, except the Irishman’s, through which shrill screams were issuing. Lastly, the poor lame gardener was standing in his little plot disconsolately regarding the wreck of his cherished flowers, which looked as though they had been trampled over by a regiment.

“Mike Finigan done it,” he explained, in answer to the Duchess’s sympathetic exclamation. “’E got outer prison yisterday, and ’e come in drunk lorst night with ’is crew, and played old ’Arry all over the place.”

As if the presence of the Duchess had instantly become known, by what is called mental telepathy, to every resident in the Cooperage, all the other doors were thrown open, and the women crowded about her, recounting the tale of the Irishman’s misdeeds, and denouncing their author. The owner of the broken birdcage pointed to it, not without a certain melancholy pride in her pre-eminence of wrong.

“’E broke it ’isself, and ’is mates killed my bird; and there I’m going to let it lie till I ’aves the law of ’im, the roughing.”

Whether the woman believed that the continuance of the broken cage on its present spot would be a strong confirmation of her story, like the bricks in Jack Cade’s chimney, or whether she had some obscure feeling like that which causes a Brahmin creditor to starve himself to death, in a spirit of revenge, on his debtor’s doorstep, and considered the wrecked cage as a talisman which would work harm to the wrongdoer, she failed to explain. But the threat of legal proceedings was not taken seriously by her neighbours, the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage regarding an appeal to the constituted authorities with much the same feeling as schoolboys do a complaint to a master. The poor have an instinct which teaches them that the State is their enemy; they are a subject population within the borders of the Raj.

While the group round the Duchess were still shrilly vociferating, evidently with the object of making their reflections reach the ears of the Irishman in his retreat, they were interrupted by the appearance of two figures in the mouth of the archway.

One of these new-comers was a man, the other a girl of nineteen or twenty. At the sight of the first the Duchess of Trent frowned slightly, but her face brightened again as she caught sight of his companion, whom she had come out this morning in the secret hope of meeting.

There is a type of womanhood known all over the world as English, and in that bright and gracious type Hero Vanbrugh was completely moulded. It is not a type of classical perfection, like that associated with the Roman virgin; it does not cast that intoxicating spell over the passions of men which Southern poets mean by love. The Southern language has no word for this type; it is only the dear old Northern names of maid and sweetheart and wife which express its tender charm.

Hero Vanbrugh, as she stood framed in the archway, was a picture to gladden the eyes. It was not only that her features were delicately chiselled, and her body a harmony of slenderness and strength; there were men who declared that at some moments she seemed to them to be actually plain; but the freshness of the rain was in her face, and the laughter of the wind in her hair, and the blue breath of the sea in her eyes, and there were other men to whom at many moments she seemed the fairest sight that they had ever looked upon.

The dress which she wore was of that unpretending serviceable pattern which would have been deemed almost masculine a few years before. In the eyes of a man the simple coat with its white collar, and the plain skirt, might have appeared homely, but the eye of another woman would have been quick to note the marks of an artist’s hand in the cut of each garment, and would have credited the wearer with perfect taste, coupled with the means to gratify it.

The man who stood beside her in the archway was as unlike her as it was possible to be.

If Hero Vanbrugh might have been taken as a type of all that was best in English humanity, the same could scarcely have been said of her companion. Big and bull-necked, with coarse, flushed features, small, deep-set eyes, and a round fleshy chin, he might have passed, in a different dress, for a comrade of Mike Finigan himself. His costume would have marked him out in any other country as a Roman priest. He wore the shovel hat, with a long brim projecting before and behind, which is associated with the stage priest of comic opera, and his whole figure, from the neck to the ankles, was enveloped in a long black robe of design similar to that worn by Noah and his family in the toy arks. The priests of Rome in this country being in the habit of adopting a dress corresponding with the character of that worn by the people among whom they live, this outlandish disguise served to indicate that the wearer was in Anglican Orders. He was, in fact, the Rev. Aloysius Grimes, curate of St. Jermyn’s parish.

The Rev. Aloysius was one of that class which has flowed into the ranks of the clergy of late years in increasing numbers, to fill the gap created by the falling off in the supply of graduates from the Universities, a falling off due as much to the decline in the value of the Church’s preferments, perhaps, as to the decline of belief in her doctrines. The son of a small tradesman in the suburbs, he had passed from a higher-grade Board School into a theological college. He had entered the college an ordinary sharp London lad of the lower orders, and left it the social equal of dukes.

Such a youth, strongly conscious of the importance of the step he had gained, was not likely to listen with reluctant ears to any doctrine which exaggerated the dignity of his profession. The Rev. Aloysius came out into the world firmly impressed that he was a priest, commissioned by the Maker of the Universe to teach and to rule mankind, endowed with power to bestow the absolution and remission of sins, and supernaturally enabled to work the awful miracle of Transubstantiation.

Between the Duchess of Trent and Mr. Grimes there was an instinctive antagonism, which each strove to veil beneath the outward forms of courtesy, the Duchess because she respected the curate’s cloth, the curate because he respected her Grace’s rank. To the Duchess the doctrines held and taught by the Rev. Aloysius were simply and literally blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. She supposed that they had been abandoned as such at the Reformation, and she understood them so to be condemned by the Articles of the English Church. Yet she perceived that they were now freely tolerated within its pale by those to whom the government of the Church was committed, and she shrank with real pain from setting up her own judgment against that of the Episcopal Bench.

What added to her distress was the fact that she was unable to credit the head of that Bench with any belief in what she had always regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. That doctrine in her mind was the Atonement. The great truth which Catholicism images in the crucifix seemed to her the central one of Christianity, and those who doubted it became in her view mere Deists, with a reverence for Jesus of Nazareth. Such a Deist she believed Dr. Dresden, the then Primate, to be, and, believing it, she regarded even the Rev. Aloysius as more worthy of his place in the Church than the Archbishop.

Mr. Grimes glided in front, fawning over the hand of the Duchess, before Hero could come up.

“I am so delighted to meet you here, Duchess. It is so good of you to do so much for our poor people. They are always singing your praises.”

The Duchess made the briefest response to these compliments as she turned to greet Hero.

“My dear, how well you are looking! One would think that St. Jermyn’s was a health-resort, to see you. Now I wonder whether you will take compassion on a poor old woman, and let me carry you home to lunch with me presently?”

Hero blushed as she listened to these old-fashioned compliments.

“You are exceedingly kind, Duchess. I shall be delighted. I came here in the brougham to-day, so that I shall be able to send a message to my father to let him know where I am. But what is all this about?” She turned to the excited women who were now repeating the tale of Mike Finigan’s outrages in the ears of Mr. Grimes.

The Rev. Aloysius was listening with a troubled brow. In his secret heart he had a great respect for Finigan, partly because he knew that the Irishman had no respect at all for him, and regarded him as an impostor, dressed in plumes borrowed from his own clergy, partly because of the superior example which the Finigans showed to his own flock in the matter of reverence for the priesthood. The hooligan and his family in their wildest moments treated their own priest as being invested with dreadful sanctity and tremendous powers. They firmly believed that Father Molyneux could strike any one of them dead without moving an eyelash; if one of them had been betrayed into lifting a hand against the Father’s person, they would have expected to see it wither to a stump. Yet Father Molyneux was a very insignificant-looking little man, with a jolly smile, and a brogue like the scent of an onion, who went about dressed in a shabby overcoat and a disreputable hat of the ordinary chimney-pot shape. He said “Sorr” to Mr. Grimes when that gentleman condescended to greet him in the street, and never showed by a word or look that he did not regard him as a superior by whose notice he was honoured. It was true that the little priest had a reputation for humour among his own friends; a sound as of laughter was sometimes heard issuing from the presbytery as the Rev. Aloysius passed by; a book entitled “The Secret History of the Romish Conspiracy” had been found by the priest’s housekeeper in the cupboard where his reverence kept his whisky and his slippers; but those things were mercifully hidden from the curate of St. Jermyn’s.

Mr. Grimes turned towards Hero, as she came forward, shaking his head.

“I’m afraid it’s a sad business, Miss Vanbrugh. Finigan has broken out again. I can’t understand how it is that a man so well conducted in some respects, with such genuine faith in his religion, schismatic though it may appear to us, should be guilty of outrages like this.”

Hero flushed up. She did not share the elder woman’s deep-rooted prejudice against the Catholicizing movement, which attracted her strongly on its æsthetic side, but her English common sense remained to her.

“The man is a drunken brute, who ought to have been sent to penal servitude for fourteen years, instead of being let off with a paltry fourteen days!” she exclaimed. “What are prisons for, I should like to know, except to protect peaceful folk from ruffians like that?”

The Rev. Aloysius shook his head doubtfully. He was inclined to read the text, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” in a very broad sense, and to consider that Mike Finigan’s admirable loyalty to his creed ought to atone for any trifling disregard of his neighbours’ peace and comfort.

But the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage, whose rude minds failed to appreciate the beauty of Mr. Finigan’s theological attitude, in the face of their broken flower-pots and slaughtered pets, were quick to perceive that Hero was the champion of whom they stood in need. They deserted the curate to besiege her with their complaints; the owner of the birdcage renewed her direful malediction, and another woman, who could boast no injury on her own account, drew the sympathetic young lady to the scene of the trampled wallflowers.

The sight aroused Miss Vanbrugh’s wrath in real earnest.

“I have a great mind to send for the police myself,” she declared. “I only wish I had seen him do it, so that I could give evidence.”

The women shrank back at these words. Their anger against Finigan, already partly relieved by the mere exertion of denouncing him, was cooled at once by Miss Vanbrugh’s threat.

“That ’ud only mike it wuss, miss,” the lame man responded dolefully. “’E’d come out again at the end of a week like a mad Calico, an’ not leave a roof over our ’eads.”

Before Hero had time to resolve this extraordinary expression into an allusion to the late Khalifa of the Soudan there was a stir among the little group behind, caused by the sudden appearance of Mike Finigan himself at the door of his abode.

Now that the women perceived that their clamour had achieved its purpose of rousing the evildoer, they suddenly became silent. Finigan lounged forward, with a masterful air, his hands in his pockets, and surveyed his neighbours disdainfully.

It said, in the history-books out of which the small Britons of Beers Cooperage were taught in the Board School, that Ireland had been conquered by England in the year of grace 1172. The history-books said nothing about the conquest of Beers Cooperage by Mike Finigan.

Seen close at hand, the Irishman did not look a remarkably vicious or ill-disposed creature. His face was of the dark, heavy, animal type to be met with in some of the western counties of England itself. He represented that mixed remnant of old, forgotten races which is found washed up in out-of-the-way corners of the land, the relics of prehistoric wanderings and subjugations, the rubble of European man.

Because his ancestors during a thousand years or so had spoken a Gaelic dialect, learned language-mongers called Mike Finigan a Celt. His name might have told them that he was a mongrel Finn, between whom and the fair-haired, blue-eyed Gauls who took Rome there was no more kinship than between the Chinaman and the Greek. The traditions of his own land, had the language-mongers cared to study them, would have disclosed to them the existence of half a dozen strange older races, some of whom in all likelihood were still speaking Neolithic dialects of their own when the armies of Cæsar landed in Britain.

This primitive savage had been brought from his native bogs, and set down among a peaceable town-dwelling population, chiefly of Dutch descent, by the economic machinery of the Raj. The Raj had taught him to speak its language, and bestowed upon him a voice in the choice of its administrators.

Now the Raj was trying to digest Mike Finigan.

In his own country, dwelling on some bare hillside beaten by the rains of the Atlantic, the Irishman might have seemed a picturesque figure. Living the life that was natural to him, digging his native peat, and finding an outlet for his brutal instincts in the folk-fights that formed the immemorial pastime of the country-side, he would have been a harmless subject.

In the streets of London he was a dangerous criminal. The civilized life brought out all that was worst in this wild nature. It galled him with its manifold restraints. It stunned him with its monotony of work. It teased him with its decorum. It stifled him with its lack of air and space. Finally, it drove him to the public-house.

If dirt be matter in the wrong place, so is crime conduct in an unfit historical or geographical environment. If the hooligan had lived a few thousand years earlier he would have been a hero. He would have refreshed himself with his native mead before going into battle, and his strength becoming as the strength of ten, he would have been deemed of supernatural birth. His exploits would have become the theme of bards, divine honours would have been rendered to his memory, and, his figure shining through the mist of saga like a demigod’s, learned students would have been engaged to-day in identifying him with the solar orb.

As it was, Mike Finigan’s history was already written to its end. After a long or short series of savage atrocities, after wounding and maiming a certain number of peaceable citizens, and being punished by sentences ranging from a small fine to six months’ hard labour, according to the magistrate before whom he happened to be brought, one of Mike Finigan’s kicks some day, probably by pure accident, would cause a death; when society, seizing the excuse for which it had been waiting all along, would hang Mike Finigan. A pity that you could not have passed the sentence before the murder, and commuted it to transportation, back to the little shieling in the potato-patch from which you dragged his father, Your Majesty the public!

The effect of alcohol is different on different constitutions, a truism which fanatics forget. On Finigan its effect was to make him a raging wild beast. His unfortunate neighbours would have been the first to bear witness that when the drink was not in him the Irishman was harmless enough. His speech was always coarse, and he was a stranger to soap and water, but those were venial faults in the light of his drunken frolics. At such moments the appearance of the Khalifa himself in their archway would have struck less consternation into the dwellers in the Cooperage than Mike Finigan’s.

After one of these outbursts the Irishman was usually sullen and silent for a day or two, during which period his neighbours found it wisest to leave him alone. He was in that condition, surly, but not dangerous, as he strode forth to silence his assailants.

At the sight of the Duchess he paused, uncertain. Though he had uttered a coarse threat against any Protestant who should invade his own home, he had acquired a tacit respect for the quiet lady who visited his neighbours, and perhaps there were times when he would not have been sorry if the Duchess had disregarded his words, and included his wife and family in her friendly ministrations. A secret shame at having disgraced himself in her eyes caused him to assume a defiant and insolent air as he demanded of the women:

“And what have yez got to say agin me, now I’m here?”

The women shrank back terrorized.

The Duchess thought it useless for her to speak. But Mr. Grimes, anxious to show her Grace how well he could administer a priestly reproof, rashly undertook to answer the bully.

“I wonder you are not ashamed to ask the question, Finigan. You have been behaving in a shocking, scandalous manner. Do you consider what disgrace you bring, not merely on yourself as a man, but on the Church to which you belong?”

The Irishman turned red.

“Here, Mister, yez lave me Church alone, an’ I’ll lave yours,” he muttered.

The Rev. Aloysius smiled at the success with which he had touched the man’s weak spot.

“I am not blaming your Church,” he said impressively. “The teaching you have received is good enough for you to know when you have done wrong. I am pointing out to you that your neighbours here, who do not know and understand the Church of Rome as I know and understand it, are not likely to have their opinion of it raised by such conduct as yours last night.”

The curate was warming to his work, and would have gone on to inflict further stabs on the sensitive place, when suddenly the Irishman clenched his fists, and stepped towards him.

“Say another word about me Church, good or bad, and, be the Howly Moses, I’ll knock yer teeth down yer Protestant throat!”

The Rev. Aloysius fairly recoiled, stunned, to do him justice, as much by the insult conveyed in the description of himself as a Protestant as by the threat of personal violence. It was too bitter; the serpent of schism had raised its baleful crest, and stung him in the very midst of his flock.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one suspected the true cause of his agitation. Before he could frame a suitable retort an unexpected ally came to his rescue.

Hero Vanbrugh had listened impatiently to the curate’s attempted admonition of the hooligan. Her indignation at the brutalities whose effects she had just seen was still hot within her, and the Irishman’s hectoring demeanour made it boil over.

She walked up quickly, and confronted him with blazing eyes.

“You coward! How dare you stand there and bluster! How dare you come out and show yourself, in the face of all the mean, silly, brutal, wicked things you did last night! Where is the bird you and your friends killed? There is its cage! Look at it, and stay here and brazen it out if you dare! Look at that poor man’s flowers all trodden down and broken! I wonder you can bring yourself to pass them! To rob a poor lame man! a cripple! I suppose you will beat him next, or murder him if you are not afraid of the police. I tell you, you are a coward, nothing but a big hulking coward, who goes about bullying women and children—and cripples! Go! Don’t stay out here! Go and hide yourself, lest a man should come along and see you!”

Then a great thing happened. For Mike Finigan, the tyrant of Beers Cooperage and the terror of the police, raised his finger to his forelock, and with a muttered—“Beg pardon, miss,” turned round, and shrank back into his house like a thoroughly ashamed man.

The Duchess turned to Hero with a look of grateful admiration.

“You did that splendidly, my dear. Thank you.”

The women, relieved of the presence of their enemy, would have burst out in a triumphant chorus, but Hero restrained them with a gesture, and the next minute they were surprised to see her turn white and totter against the side of the Duchess, who hastened to draw her away.