she was to hear them always: signal guns of her life, they meant
courage, cheerfulness, self-sacrifice.

Of Hetty's father, the "young Squire," as to the day of his death he was
called by the older people in Welbury, and of Hetty's mother, his
wife, it is not needful to say much here. The young Squire was a lazy,
affectionate man to whom the good things of life had come without his
taking any trouble for them: even his wife had been more than half wooed
for him by his doting father; and there were those who said that pretty
Mrs. Gunn had been quite as much in love with the old Squire, old as he
was, as with the young one; but that was only an idle village sneer. The
young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only
child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would
have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she
was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this
overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of
some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As
Hetty grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of
responsibility for her father's and mother's happiness. She was the most
filially docile of creatures, and obeyed like a baby, grown woman as she
was. It was strange to hear and to see.

"Hetty, bring me my overcoat," her father would say to her in her
thirty-fifth year, exactly as he would have said it in her twelfth; and
she would spring with the same alacrity and the same look of pleasure at
being of use. But there was a filial service which she rendered to her
parents much deeper than these surface obediences and attentions. They
were but dimly conscious of it; and yet, had it been taken away from
them, they had found their lives blighted indeed. She was the link
between them and the outside world. She brought merriment, cheer, hearty