“But she is a strange mixture,” said my Lord Twemlow’s Chaplain, in speaking of her, “and though she hath so changed, hath scarce changed at all.  Her black eye can flame as bright as ever under her long widow’s veil.  She visits the poor with her sister, and gives charities, but she will have no beggarly tricks, and can pick out a hypocrite at his first whining, howsoever clever he may be.  One came to her last week with a lying tale of having loved the old Earl Dunstanwolde, and been his pensioner for years.  And to see her mark the weak points of his story, and to hear the wit with which she questioned him until he broke down affrighted, was a thing to marvel at.

“‘Think you,’ she said, ’that I will let knaves trade on my lord’s goodness, and play tricks in his name?  You shall all see.  In the stocks you shall sit and repent it—­a warning to other rascals.’”

But in the miserable, long-neglected village of Wildairs she did such deeds as made her remembered to the end of many lives.  No village was in worse case than this had been for years, as might well be expected.  Falling walls, rotting thatches, dirt and wretchedness were to be seen on all sides; cottages were broken-paned and noisome, men and women who should have been hale were drawn with rheumatism from mouldering dampness, or sodden with drink and idleness; children who should have been rosy and clean and studying their horn books, at the dame school, were little, dirty, evil, brutal things.

“And no blame of theirs, but yours,” said my lady to her father.

“Thou didst not complain in days gone by, Clo,” said Sir Jeoffry, “but swore at them roundly when they ran in thy horse’s way as thou went at gallop through the village, and called the men and women lousy pigs who should be whipt.”

“Did I?” said her ladyship, looking at him with large eyes.  “Ay, that I did.  In those days surely I was mad and blind.”

“Wildairs village is no credit to its owner,” grumbled Sir Jeoffry.  “Wherefore should it be?  I am a poor man—­I can do naught for it.”

“I can,” said my Lady Dunstanwolde.

And so she did, but at first when she entered the tumbledown cottages, looking so tall, a black figure in her sweeping draperies and widow’s veil, the people were more than half affrighted.  But soon she won them from their terror with her own strange power, and they found that she was no longer the wild young lady who had dashed through their hamlet in hunting garb, her dogs following her, and the glance of her black eyes and the sound of her mocking laugh things to flee before.  Her eyes had grown kind, and she had a way none could resist, and showed a singular knowledge of poor folks’ wants and likings.  Her goodness to them was not that of the ordinary lady who felt that flannel petticoats and soup and scriptural readings made up the sum of all requirements.  There were other things she knew and talked to them of, as if they were human creatures like herself.