Miss Spraggs, Hilda Devitt's elder sister, lived with the family at
Melkbridge House. She was a virgin with a taste for scribbling,
which commonly took the form of lengthy letters written to those she
thought worthy of her correspondence. She had diligently read every
volume of letters, which she could lay hands on, of persons whose
performance was at all renowned in this department of literature
(foreign ones in translations), and was by way of being an agreeable
rattle, albeit of a pinchbeck, provincial genus. Miss Spraggs was
much courted by her relations, who were genuinely proud of her local
literary reputation. Also, let it be said, that she had the disposal
of capital bringing in five hundred a year.

Montague's eldest son, Harold, was, at once, the pride and grief of
the Devitts, although custom had familiarised them with the calamity
attaching to his life.

He had been a comely, athletic lad, with a nature far removed from
that of the other Devitts; he had seemed to be in the nature of a
reversion to the type of gentleman, who, it was said, had
imprudently married an ancestress of Montague's first wife. Whether
or not this were so, in manner, mind, and appearance Harold was
generations removed from his parents and brother. He had been the
delight of his father's eye, until an accident had put an end to the
high hopes which his father had formed of his future. A canal ran
through Melkbridge; some way from the town this narrowed its course
to run beneath a footbridge, locally known as the "Gallows" bridge.

It was an achievement to jump this stretch of water; Harold Devitt
was renowned amongst the youth of the neighbourhood for the