striking and well-bred-looking, and her plenitude of good-natured
interest in everybody, and her pleasure in everything out of which
pleasure could be wrested, gave her big eyes a fresh look which made her
seem rather like a nice overgrown girl than a mature woman whose life
was a continuous struggle with the narrowest of mean fortunes.

She was a woman of good blood and of good education, as the education of
such women goes. She had few relatives, and none of them had any
intention of burdening themselves with her pennilessness. They were
people of excellent family, but had quite enough to do to keep their
sons in the army or navy and find husbands for their daughters. When
Emily's mother had died and her small annuity had died with her, none of
them had wanted the care of a big raw-boned girl, and Emily had had the
situation frankly explained to her. At eighteen she had begun to work as
assistant teacher in a small school; the year following she had taken a
place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an
unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the
country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting
her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have
driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most
matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an
unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast
of her mistress a ray of human feeling. When the old woman at length
died, and Emily was to be turned out into the world, it was revealed
that she had been left a legacy of a few hundred pounds, and a letter
containing some rather practical, if harshly expressed, advice.

Go back to London [Mrs. Maytham had written in her feeble, crabbed
hand]. You are not clever enough to do anything remarkable in the way of
earning your living, but you are so good-natured that you can make