Elizabethan have called her "gipsy," Miss Dobson now, in the midst of
the Edvardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres. Late in her
'teens she had become an orphan and a governess. Her grandfather had
refused her appeal for a home or an allowance, on the ground that he
would not be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once
forbidden and not yet forgiven. Lately, however, prompted by curiosity
or by remorse, he had asked her to spend a week or so of his declining
years with him. And she, "resting" between two engagements--one at
Hammerstein's Victoria, N.Y.C., the other at the Folies Bergeres,
Paris--and having never been in Oxford, had so far let bygones be
bygones as to come and gratify the old man's whim.

It may be that she still resented his indifference to those early
struggles which, even now, she shuddered to recall. For a governess'
life she had been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard she had thought it,
that penury should force her back into the school-room she was scarce
out of, there to champion the sums and maps and conjugations she had
never tried to master. Hating her work, she had failed signally to
pick up any learning from her little pupils, and had been driven from
house to house, a sullen and most ineffectual maiden. The sequence of
her situations was the swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there
a grown-up son, always he fell in love with her, and she would let his
eyes trifle boldly with hers across the dinner-table. When he offered
her his hand, she would refuse it--not because she "knew her place,"
but because she did not love him. Even had she been a good teacher,
her presence could not have been tolerated thereafter. Her corded
trunk, heavier by another packet of billets-doux and a month's salary
in advance, was soon carried up the stairs of some other house.

It chanced that she came, at length, to be governess in a large family