novel, written in 1791, was "A Simple Story." With "Nature and
Art," a tale written later, it has kept a place among the
fiction that is reprinted for successive generations. In later
years Mrs. Inchbald lived quietly on her savings, retaining a
flattering social position by her beauty and cleverness. She
died on August 1, 1821.


_I.--The Priest's Ward_


Dorriforth, bred at St. Omer's in all the scholastic rigour of that
college, was, by education and the solemn vows of his order, a Roman
Catholic priest. He was about thirty, and refusing to shelter himself
from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister, but
finding that shelter in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and
temperance, had lived in London near five years, when a gentleman with
whom he had contracted a most sincere friendship died, and left him the
sole guardian of his daughter, who was then eighteen.

It is in this place proper to remark that Mr. Milner was a member of the
Church of Rome, but his daughter had been educated in her dead mother's
religion at a boarding-school for Protestants, whence she had returned
with her little heart employed in all the endless pursuits of personal
accomplishments, and her mind left without one ornament, except such as
nature gave.

She had been visiting at Bath when her father died. Therefore, Mr.
Dorriforth, together with Miss Woodley, the middle-aged niece of the
widow lady, Mrs. Horton, who kept his house, journeyed midway to meet