poor.

When that excellent aged lady, Miss Regina van Tromp, sister to the
well-known Paris banker, was felled by a stroke of apoplexy, the
personal calamity might, by a mind taking all things into account, have
been considered balanced by the circumstance that it was affording
employment to some refined woman of reduced means, capable of taking
care of the invalid. It had the further advantage that, coming suddenly
as it did, it absorbed the attention of Miss Lucilla van Tromp, the sick
lady's companion and niece, who became unable henceforth to give to the
household of her cousin, Derek Pruyn, that general supervision which a
kindly old maid can exercise in the home of a young and prosperous
widower. Were Destiny on the lookout for still another opening, she
could have found it in the fact that Miss Dorothea Pruyn, whose father's
discipline came by fits and starts, while his indulgence was continuous,
had reached a point in motherless maidenhood where, according to Miss
Lucilla, "something ought to be done." There was thus unrest, and a
straining after new conditions, in that very family toward which Mrs.
Eveleth's imagination turned from this dreary, leaden sea as to a
possible haven.

Since the wonderful morning when the banker had brought her the news of
her little inheritance her thoughts had dwelt much on Van Tromps and
Pruyns, as representatives of that old New York clan with which she
deigned to claim alliance; and she found no small comfort in going over,
again and again, the details of the interview which had brought her once
more into contact with her kin. James van Tromp, she informed Diane, as
they lay covered with rugs in their steamer-chairs, had been gruff in
manner, but kind in heart, like all the Van Tromps she had ever heard
of. He had not scrupled to dwell upon her past extravagance, but he had