excellent friends."

But Mrs. Kane was not slow to read the expression of Hetty's large
dark-fringed eyes, which, with all the frankness of childhood, betrayed
their owner's thoughts; and she knew that Hetty would find no pleasure
in learning to recall the inglorious circumstances of her infancy.

Hetty had still less recollection of the Enderby family than of Mrs.
Kane, but she felt very much more willing to be introduced to its
members than to the cottage woman. Looking upon herself as Mrs.
Rushton's only child, she considered the Wavertree children as her
cousins and their father and mother as her uncle and aunt. Mrs. Rushton
had always talked to her of them in such a way as to lead her to regard
them in this light. Occasionally a strange little laugh or a few
sarcastic words from Mrs. Rushton had grated on the child's ear in the
midst of her foster-mother's pleasantly expressed anticipations of
Hetty's future intercourse with her own relations; and the little girl
had, on such occasions, felt a chill of vague fear, and a momentary pang
of anxiety as to the reception she might possibly meet with from these
people, none of whom had ever been found by a poor labouring man alone
on a wild sea-shore, or had lived with a humble woman in a cottage. That
the "disgrace" of such a past clung round herself, Grant's disagreeable
eyes would never allow her to forget. Such were poor Hetty's disordered
ideas with regard to herself and her little world, when Mrs. Rushton's
carriage drew up that day before the door of Wavertree Hall.

Mrs. Enderby was seated at her embroidery in the drawing-room beside her
small elegant tea-table, and looked the very ideal of an English
gentlewoman in her silver-gray silk and delicate lace ruffles, and with
her fair, almost colourless hair twisted in neat shining braids round