'Evelina,' so far as could be gathered from her recollection of them.
The week her father had spent with her, before his last voyage, had
been the one vivid memory of her life, and had taught her at least
how to love. Poor child, that happy week had had to serve her ever
since, through eleven years of unbroken school! Not that she pitied
herself. Everybody had been kind to her-—governesses, masters,
girls, and all. She had been happy and successful, and had made
numerous friends, about whom, as she grew more at home, she freely
chatted to Mrs. Brownlow, who was always ready to hear of Mary
Ogilvie and Clara Cartwright, and liked to draw out the stories of
the girl-world, in which it was plain that Caroline Allen had been a
bright, good, clever girl, getting on well, trusted and liked. She
had been half sorry to leave her dear old school, half glad to go on
to something new. She was evidently not so comfortable, while Miss
Heath's lowest teacher, as she had been while she was the asylum's
senior pupil. Yet when on Sunday evening the Doctor was summoned and
the ladies were left tete-a-tete, she laughed rather than complained.
But still she owned, with her black head on Mrs. Brownlow's lap, that
she had always craved for something-—something, and she had found it
now!

Everything was a fresh joy to her, every print on the walls, every
ornament on the brackets, seemed to speak to her eye and to her soul
both at once, and the sense of comfort and beauty and home, after the
bareness of school, seemed to charm her above all. "I always did
want to know what was inside people's windows," she said.

And in the same way it was a feast to her to get hold of "a real
book," as she called it, not only the beginnings of everything, and
selections that always broke off just as she began to care about