among companions whose
parents were more fortunate in this world's goods; that she denied
herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated. Nor is
it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly complex
organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine, who was
shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.

Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by one
the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a
remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and
winter. The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the
servants who had been left behind chattered on the front steps. Honora
could not bear the sound of the trains that drifted across the night,
and the sight of the trunks piled in the Hanburys' hall, in Wayland
Square, always filled her with a sickening longing. Would the day ever
come when she, too, would depart for the bright places of the earth?
Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was filled with a fierce
belief in a destiny to sit in the high seats, to receive homage and
dispense bounties, to discourse with great intellects, to know London
and Paris and the marts and centres of the world as her father had. To
escape--only to escape from the prison walls of a humdrum existence, and
to soar!

Let us, if we can, reconstruct an August day when all (or nearly all)
of Honora's small friends were gone eastward to the mountains or the
seaside. In "the little house under the hill," the surface of which was
a hot slate roof, Honora would awake about seven o'clock to find old
Catherine bending over her in a dun-coloured calico dress, with the
light fiercely beating against the closed shutters that braved it so
unflinchingly throughout the day.

"The birds are before ye, Miss Honora, honey, and your uncle waterin'
his roses this half-hour."

Uncle Tom was indeed an early riser. As Honora dressed (Catherine
assisting as at a ceremony), she could see him, in his seersucker coat,
bending tenderly over his beds; he lived enveloped in a peace which has
since struck wonder to Honora's soul. She lingered in her dressing, even
in those days, falling into reveries from which Catherine gently and
deferentially aroused her; and Uncle Tom would be carving the beefsteak
and Aunt Mary pouring the coffee when she finally arrived in the dining
room to nibble at one of Bridget's unforgettable rolls or hot bisc