 the instance above mentioned, was a very favourable circumstance for Mr. Corbold. There was, perhaps, no other subject in the world upon which he was competent to give information (except in the technicalities of his own profession); but in every thing relating to missionary meetings, branch-missionary meetings' reports, child's missionary branch committees, London Lord's day's societies, and the like, he was quite perfect. All this gave him a value in Mrs. Mowbray's eyes as a companion which he might have wanted without it. At all conversations of this kind, Mrs. Mowbray took great care that Helen should be present, persuaded that nothing could be so likely to give her that savour of righteousness in which, as yet, she was so greatly deficient.

The consequence of this arrangement was twofold. On Helen's side, it generated a feeling compounded of contempt and loathing towards the fanatical attorney, which in most others would have led to the passion called hatred; but in her it seemed rather a passive than an active sentiment, which would never have sought either nourishment or relief in doing injury to its object, but which rendered her so ill at ease in his presence that her life became perfectly wretched from the frequency of it.

On the part of the gentleman, the effect of these frequent interviews was different. From thinking Mrs. Mowbray's daughter a very fair young person, he grew by gradual, but pretty rapid degrees, to perceive that she was the very loveliest tabernacle in which had ever been enshrined the spirit of a woman; and by the time Mrs. Mowbray had learned by rote the names, titles, connexions, separations, unions, deputations, and endowments of all the missionary societies, root and branch, and of all the central and eccentric establishments for the instruction of ignorance in infants of four months to adults of fourscore, Mr. Stephen Corbold had made up his mind to believe that, by fair means or foul, it was his bounden duty, as a pious man and serious Christian, to appropriate the fair Helen to himself in this life, and thereby ensure her everlasting happiness in the life to come.

It must not be supposed that while these things passed in London the Vicar of Wrexhill was forgotten. Mrs. Mowbray's heart and conscience both told her that such a letter as she had received from him must not remain unanswered: she therefore placed Helen in the drawing-room, with a small but very closely-printed volume on "Free Grace," recommended by Mr. Corbold,
