distracted her. She and her step-mother did not possess a single sympathy
in common. Her relations with her father were in much the same condition.
She could compassionate his poverty, and she could treat him with the
forbearance and respect due to him from his child. As to really
venerating and loving him--the less said about that the better. Her
happiest days had been the days she spent with her uncle and aunt; her
visits to the Batchfords had grown to be longer and longer visits with
every succeeding year. If the father, in appealing to the daughter's
sympathies, had not dexterously contrived to unite the preservation of
her independence with the continuance of her residence under his roof,
she would, on coming of age, either have lived altogether with her aunt,
or have set up an establishment of her own. As it was, the rector had
secured his five hundred a year, on terms acceptable to both sides--and,
more than that, he had got her safe under his own eye. For, remark, there
was one terrible possibility threatening him in the future--the
possibility of Lucilla's marriage!

Such was the strange domestic position of this interesting creature, at
the time when I entered the house.

You will now understand how completely puzzled I was when I recalled what
had happened on the evening of my arrival, and when I asked myself--in
the matter of the mysterious stranger--what course I was to take next. I
had found Lucilla a solitary being--helplessly dependent in her blindness
on others--and, in that sad condition, without a mother, without a
sister, without a friend even in whose sympathies she could take refuge,
in whose advice she could trust. I had produced a first favorable
impression on her; I had won her liking at once, as she had won mine. I
had accompanied her on an evening walk, innocent of all suspicion of what
was going on in her mind. I had by pure accident enabled a stranger to