Mr. Raymount and the major cared little for this aspect of the matter, for they felt that the public is only a sort of innocent, whose behaviour may be troublesome or pleasant, but whose opinion is worth considerably less than that of a wise hound. The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship. Neither did the father care much for lord Gartley, though he had liked him. The major, we know, both despised and detested him.

Hester herself was annoyed to find how soon the idea of his lordship came to be altogether a thing of her past. But she was able to look on the whole blunder with calmness, and a thankfulness that kept growing as the sting of her fault lost its burning, lenified in the humility it brought.

There was nothing left her now, she said to herself, but the best of all—a maiden life devoted to the work of her master. She was not willing any more to run the risk of loosing her power to help the Lord’s creatures, down trodden of devils, well-to-do people, and their own miserable weaknesses and vices. Now she would hold herself free! What a blessed thing it was to be her own mistress and the slave of the Lord, externally free! To be the slave of a husband was the worst of all slavery except self-slavery!

Nor was there in her conclusion anything of disappointment or self-humiliation. St. Paul abstained from marriage that he might the better do the work given him by the Lord. For his perilous and laborious work it was better, he judged, that he should not be married. It was for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.

Her spirits soon returned more buoyant than before. Her health was better. She found she had been suffering from an oppression she had refused to recognize—already in no small measure yoked, and right unequally. Only a few weeks passed, and, in the prime of health and that glorious thing feminine strength, she looked a yet grander woman than before. There was greater freedom in her carriage, and she seemed to have grown. The humility that comes with the discovery of error had made her yet more dignified. True dignity comes only of humility. Pride is the ruin of dignity, for it is a worshipping of self, and that involves a continuous sinking. Humility, the worship of the Ideal—that is, of the man Christ Jesus, is the only lifter-up of the head.

Everybody felt her more lovable than before. Her mother began to feel an enchantment of peace in her presence. Her father sought her company more than ever in his walks, and talked about his own wrong feelings toward Corney and how he had been punished for them by what they wrought in him. He had begun, he told her, to learn many things he had supposed he knew—he had only thought and written and talked about them before! Father and daughter were therefore much to each other now. Even Corney perceived a change in his sister. Scarcely a shadow of what he used to feel of “superiority” remained in her. She became more and more Amy’s ideal of womanhood, and she showed her husband how few sisters would have tried to protect and deliver him as she had done, and would have so generously taken herself, a poor and uneducated girl, to a sister’s heart. So, altogether, they were growing toward becoming a true family as God intended families to be.