especial need was discipline. By her confidences and her flatteries
she set Clara aflame with spiritual pride. Ceaselessly she excited
her to ambition, remarked on her gifts, made dazzling forecast of
her future. Clara was to be a teacher first of all, but only that
she might be introduced to the notice of people who would aid her to
better things. And the child came to regard this as the course
inevitably before her. Had she not already received school-prizes,
among them a much-gilded little volume 'for religious knowledge'?
Did she not win universal applause when she recited a piece of verse
on prize-day--Miss Harrop (disastrous kindness!) even saying that
the delivery reminded her of Mrs. ----, the celebrated actress!

Grace Rudd was busy in the same fatal work. Four years older than
Clara, weakly pretty, sentimental, conceited, she had a fancy for
patronising the clever child, to the end that she might receive
homage in return. Poor Grace! She left school, spent a year or two
at home with parents as foolish as herself, and--disappeared.
Prior to that, Miss Harrop had also passed out of Clara's ken,
driven by restlessness to try another school, away from London.

These losses appeared to affect Clara unfavourably. She began to
neglect her books, to be insubordinate, to exhibit arrogance, which
brought down upon her plenty of wholesome reproof. Her father was
not without a share in the responsibility for it all. Entering upon
his four hundred pounds, one of the first things John did was to
hire a piano, that his child might be taught to play. Pity that
Sidney Kirkwood could not then cry with effective emphasis, 'We are
the working classes! we are the lower orders!' It was exactly what
Hewett would not bring himself to understand. What! His Clara must
be robbed of chances just because her birth was not that of a young