stranger to the little town, might fancy himself a hundred miles away
from boisterous London; though he is barely clear of the great city's
smoky breath, or beyond the hearing of her myriad clamorous tongues.

There are lanes and byways leading out of that humble High Street down
to the low bank of the river; and in one of these, a pleasant place
enough, there is a row of old-fashioned semi-detached cottages, standing
in small gardens, and sheltered by sycamores and laburnums from the
dust, which in dry summer weather lies thick upon the narrow roadway.

In one of these cottages a young lady lived with her father; a young
lady who gave lessons on the piano-forte, or taught singing, for very
small remuneration. She wore shabby dresses, and was rarely known to
have a new bonnet; but people respected and admired her,
notwithstanding; and the female inhabitants of Godolphin Cottages, who
gave her good-day sometimes as she went along the dusty lane with her
well-used roll of music in her hand, declared that she was a lady bred
and born. Perhaps the good people who admired Margaret Wentworth would
have come nearer the mark if they had said that she was a lady by right
divine of her own beautiful nature, which had never required to be
schooled into grace or gentleness.

She had no mother, and she had not even the memory of her mother, who
had died seventeen years before, leaving an only child of twelve months
old for James Wentworth to keep.

But James Wentworth, being a scapegrace and a reprobate, who lived by
means that were a secret from his neighbours, had sadly neglected this
only child. He had neglected her, though with every passing year she
grew more and more like her dead mother, until at last, at eighteen