thought. As she will be brought prominently forward as our story
progresses, we had better inform the reader at once, all we know of her
antecedents.

Mr. Fraudhurst had been a lawyer of some standing in the village of
Vellenaux; he was reported wealthy, and when on the shady side of fifty
married the niece of his housekeeper, much to the disgust of the said
housekeeper, and several maiden ladies of doubtful ages who resided in
the neighbourhood, who had each in her own mind marked him as her
especial property, to be gobbled up at the first opportunity he or
chance might afford them for so doing, and they waxed wrath and were
very bitter against her who had secured the prize and carried it off
when as they thought it just within their grasp. The lawyer and the
Baronet had been upon terms of intimacy for several years prior to the
marriage, and Sir Jasper being a bachelor saw no objection to his
friend's wife visiting Vellenaux, although she had, as he would
facetiously observe, risen from the ranks.

The lady in question was, at eighteen, tall, pretty and ambitious. She
had at an early age determined to rise above the station in which she
was born, and for that object she had studied most assiduously at the
village school, where she attained the reputation of being the most apt
scholar of her class. A few years residence with a relative London
served to develop her natural abilities, and she lost no opportunity of
pursuing her studies or of affecting the tone and fashion of persons
moving in a far higher circle than her own.

Education and application she knew would doubtless do much to elevate
her in the social scale, but the position she so earnestly sought for
was to become the wife of some man of good standing in society, whose