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The house was a double-fronted one. On one side of the passage as you
went in was the office; on the other side was the family sitting-room.
Not that Mr. Madgin's family was a large one. It consisted merely of
himself, his daughter Mirpah, and one strong servant-girl with an
unlimited capacity for hard work. Mirpah Madgin deserves some notice at
our hands.

She was a tall, superb-looking young woman of two-and-twenty, and bore
not the slightest resemblance in person, whatever she might do in mind
or disposition, to that sly old fox her father. Mirpah's mother had been
of Jewish extraction, and in Mirpah's face you read the unmistakable
signs of that grand style of beauty which is everywhere associated with
the downtrodden race. She moved about the little house in her
inexpensive prints and muslins like a discrowned queen. That she had
reached the age of two-and-twenty without having been in love was no
source of surprise to those who knew her; for Mirpah Madgin hardly
looked like a girl who would marry a poor clerk or a petty tradesman, or
who could ever sink into the commonplace drudge of a hand-to-mouth
household. She looked like a girl who would some day be claimed by a
veritable hero of romance--by some Ivanhoe of modern life, well endowed
with this world's goods--who would wed her, and ride away with her to
the fairy realms of Tyburnia and Rotten Row.

And yet, truth to tell, the thread of romance inwoven with the
composition of Mirpah Madgin was a very slender one. In so far she
belied her own beauty. For a young woman she was strangely practical,
and that in a curiously unfeminine way. She was her father's managing
clerk and _alter ego_. The housewifely acts of sewing and cooking she