liking, and would even have hesitated to take the money which he was
understood to pay for his board, had he ever offered it, which he did
not. Yet still whenever he did happen to remain with them a day, or
an evening, he was good and affectionate, and always entertained them
with descriptions of all he would do as soon as he got into practice.

Meantime they kept house as economically as possible upon the little
ready money they had, hoping that more would come in--that Hilary
would get pupils.

But Hilary never did. To any body who knows London this will not be
surprising.--The wonder was in the Misses Leaf being so simple as to
imagine that a young country lady, settling herself in lodgings in an
obscure metropolitan street, without friends or introduction, could
ever expect such a thing. No thing but her own daring, and the
irrepressible well-spring of hope that was in her healthy youth,
could have sustained her in what, ten years after, would have
appeared to her, as it certainty was, downright insanity. But Heaven
takes care of the mad, the righteously and unselfishly mad, and
Heaven took care of poor Hilary.

The hundred labors she went through--weariness of body and travail of
soul, the risks she ran, the pitfalls she escaped--what need to
record here? Many have recorded the like, many more have known them,
and acknowledged that when such histories are reproduced in books how
utterly imagination fades before reality. Hilary never looked
back-upon that time herself without a shuddering wonder how she could
have dared all and gone through all. Possibly she never could, but
for the sweet old face, growing older yet sweeter every day, which
smiled upon her the minute she opened the door of that dull parlor,