to another, is the most compelling of instincts: its power great in
proportion as we have allowed our fleshly impulses to master us. If,
when they prompt, we coldly and impersonally regard them, find them
unworthy and crush them back humiliated, they become in time
disciplined--wither and die. In proportion as we permit them, upon the
other hand, they come in time to drive us with a fierceness that
cannot be checked.

Mr. Chater had disciplined no single impulse that came to him with his
flesh.

In pious horror he turned upon the girl.

"Managed to jump out!" he exclaimed, speaking as one re-echoing a
horror hardly to be believed.

"Managed to jump out! Miss Humfray, I would not have thought it of
you!"

She cried: "Mr. Chater, I fell!"

Disregarding, and with a deeper note of pained reproach, he continued:
"So many ties, I should have thought, would have bound you to my wife
in such an emergency--the length of time you have been with us; the
unremitting kindness she has shown you, treating you as one of
ourselves, in sickness tending you, bountifully feeding and clothing
you, going out of her way to make you happy. Oh, Miss Humfray!"

The strain on his invention paused him. Mrs. Chater, moved by this
astonishing revelation of her love, assumed an air in keeping--an air