work in payment for the instruction she had received.

Nancy was now working out the six months, which fact shows her age to be
between seventeen and eighteen. At that age a girl--above all, a pretty
girl--likes to wear pretty things; and Nancy had many little refined
tastes which other girls in her class of life have not--due, perhaps, to
the fact that while a child she had been a sort of protégée of Miss
Sabina Hurst's up at the Manor Farm. Miss Sabina, who was herself not
quite a lady, was nevertheless far above the Forests, who were in their
employ, and had charge of an old farmhouse at Braley Brook. She was Mr.
Hurst's sister, and had been mistress at the Manor since Mrs. Hurst had
died in giving birth to her little son Fred.

Mr. Hurst--a hard and relentless man in most things--was almost weak in
his indulgence of his son. All his fancies must be gratified, and in
this Miss Sabina concurred. One of Fred's fancies had been to make a
playmate of little Nancy Forest. It followed, then, that she had been a
great deal at the Manor; but when the children grew older, and Fred took
what his aunt and father termed "an absurd fancy" to be a musician, as
his mother had been, it occurred to them that possibly later on he might
take a yet more absurd idea, and want to marry his old playmate. Nancy
was therefore banished from the Manor Farm.

But Fred, who was not accustomed to be crossed, often met his old friend
on the hills and in the valleys; and after she had become apprenticed,
he would often walk home with her part way--not as a lover, however. For
the last two months he had broken this habit, and Nancy had not seen
him.

But we were saying that girls of Nancy's age liked pretty things to