ss Jemima Scrope is not as nice as she might be. She has a face as
hard as her manners, and, though considerably over forty, is neither
fat nor fair. She has a perfect talent for making herself obnoxious to
all unhappy enough to come within her reach, a temper like "Kate the
Curst," and a nose like the Duke of Wellington.

Somewhere to the left, on a hill as high and pompous as itself, stands
the castle, where three months out of the twelve the Duke and Duchess
of Spendleton, and some of their family, put in a dreary time. They
give two balls, one fancy bazaar, a private concert, and three
garden-parties--neither more nor less--every year. Nobody likes them
very much, because nobody knows them. Nobody dislikes them very much,
for just the same reason.

The castle is beautifully situated, and is correct in every detail.
There are Queen Anne rooms, and Gothic apartments, and Elizabethan
anterooms, and staircases of the most vague. There are secret
passages, and panels, and sliding doors, and trap-doors, and, in fact,
every sort of door you could mention, and all other abominations.
Artists revel in it, and grow frenzied with joy over its
impossibilities, and almost every year some room is painted from it
and sent to the Academy, But outside lies its chief beauty, for there
are the swelling woods, and the glimpse of the far-off ocean as it
gleams, now green, now steel-blue, beneath the rays of the setting
sun. And beyond it is Gowran, where Clarissa lives with her father,
George Peyton.

Clarissa is all that is charming. She is tall, slight, _svelte_:
indeed, earth has not anything to show more fair. She is tender, too,
and true, and very earnest,--perhaps a degree too earnest, too
intense, for every-day life. Her eyes, "twin stars of beauty," are
deep and gray; her hair is dark; her mouth, though somewhat large, is
perfect; and her smile is indescribable, so sweet it is, so soft and
lingering.

Her mother died when she was nine years old, and from that time until
she was twelve she spent most of her life with the Branscombe
boys,--riding, fishing, sometimes even shooting, with them. The effect
of such training began to make itself felt. She was fast degenerating
into a tomboy of the first water (indeed, one of the purest gems of
its kind), when James Scrope, who even then was a serious young man,
came to the rescue, and induced her father to send her from Gowran to
a school at Brussels.

"Virtue is its own reward,"