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Rh Egypt again appears rich and powerful, with signs of a fresh development of art and civilization.

 

 

, the minor canon, had, any one would have supposed, as tranquil yet as pleasantly occupied a life as a man could have. He had not very much of a clergyman's work to do. There was no need for him to harass himself about the poor, who are generally a burden upon the shoulders or hung about the neck of the parish priest; he was free from that weight which he had found himself unable to bear. He had only the morning and evening prayers to think of, very rarely even a sermon. Most clergymen like that part of their duties; they like to have it in their power to instruct, to edify, or even to torture the community in general, with perfect safety from any reprisals; but Ernest Ashford in that, as in many other things, was an exception to the general rule in his profession. He was not fond of sermons, and consequently it was a very happy thing for him that so few were required of him. He was now and then tormented by his pupils, which brought his life within the ordinary conditions of humanity; otherwise, with his daily duty in the beautiful Abbey, which was a delight to him, and the leisure of his afternoons and evenings, and the landscape that lay under his window, and the antique grace of his little house, and all his books, no existence could have been more unruffled and happy. He was as far lifted above those painful problems of common life which he could not solve, and which had weighed upon him like personal burdens in the beginning of his career, as his window was above the lovely sweep of country at the foot of the hill. What had he to do but sing Handel, to read and to muse, and to be content? These were the natural conditions of his life.

But it would appear that these conditions are not fit for perverse humanity, for few indeed are the persons so happily exempt from ordinary troubles who do not take advantage of every opportunity to drag themselves into the arena and struggle like their neighbors. Mr. Ashford did this in what may be called the most wanton and unprovoked way. What business had he to take any interest in Lottie Despard? She was out of his sphere; the Abbey stood between them a substantial obstacle, and many things a great deal more important — social differences, circumstances that tended to separate rather than to bring together. And it was not even in the orthodox and regular way that he had permitted this girl to trouble his life. He might have fallen in love with her, seeing her so often in the Abbey (for Lottie's looks were remarkable enough to attract any man), and nobody could have found fault. It is true, a great many people would have found fault; in all likelihood, people who had nothing to do with it, and no right to interfere, but who would, as a matter of course, have pitied the poor man who had been beguiled, and indignantly denounced the designing girl: but no one would have had any right to interfere. As a clergyman of the Church of England, Mr. Ashford had absolute freedom to fall in love if he pleased, and to marry if he would, and nobody would have dared to say a word. But he had not done this: he had not fallen in love, and he did not think of marriage. But being himself too tranquil in his well-being, without family cares or anxieties, perhaps out of the very forlornness of his happiness, his attention had been fixed — was it upon the first person he had encountered in the midst of a moral struggle harder, and therefore nobler, than his own quiescent state? Perhaps this was all. He could never be sure whether it was the girl fighting to keep her father and brother out of the ruin, fighting with them to make them as honest and brave as herself, or whether it was simply Lottie that interested him. Possibly it was better not to enter into this question. She was the most interesting person within his range. His brethren the canons, minor and major, were respectable or dignified clergymen, very much like the rest of the profession.

Within the Abbey precincts there was nobody with any particular claim upon the sympathy of their fellows, or whose moral position demanded special interest. The Uxbridges were anxious about their son, who was a careless boy, not any better than Law; but then the father and mother were quite enough to support that anxiety, and kept it to themselves as much as possible. It was not a matter of life and death, as in Law's case, who had neither father nor mother to care what became of him, but only Lottie — a creature who herself ought to have been cared for, and 