never
durst lift their heads on his little lawn, which even bore a French
looking-glass globe in the centre. Miss Nugent, or Miss Mary as every
one still called her, as her elder sister's marriage was recent, was
assistant teacher at the School of Art, and gave private drawing
lessons, so as to supplement the pension on which her mother lived.
They also received girls as boarders attending the High School.

So did Miss Headworth, who had all her life been one of those people
who seem condemned to toil to make up for the errors or disasters of
others. First she helped to educate a brother, and soon he had died to
leave an orphan daughter to be bred up at her cost. The girl had
married from her first situation; but had almost immediately lost her
husband at sea, and on this her aunt had settled at Micklethwayte to
make a home for her and her child, at first taking pupils, but when the
High School was set up, changing these into boarders; while Mrs.
Egremont went as daily governess to the children of a family of
somewhat higher pretensions. Little Ursula, or Nuttie, as she was
called, according to the local contraction, was like the child of all
the party, and after climbing up through the High School to the last
form, hoped, after passing the Cambridge examination, to become a
teacher there in another year.

CHAPTER II.

MONKS HORTON.

'And we will all the pleasures prove,
By shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.'--Old Ballad.

It was holiday-time, and liberties were taken such as were not
permissible, when they might have afforded a bad precedent to the
boarders. Therefore, when two afternoons later Mary Nugent, returning
from district visiting, came out into her garden behind the house, she
was not scandalised to see a pair of little black feet under a holland
skirt resting on a laurel branch, and going a few steps more she beheld
a big shady hat, and a pair of little hands busy with a pencil and a
blank book; as Ursula sat on the low wall between the gardens, shaded
by the laburnum which facilitated the ascent on her own side.

'Oh Miss Mary! Delicious! Come up here! You don't know how charming
this is.'

She moved aside so as to leave the ascent--by an inverted flower-pot
and a laurel branch--open to her friend, thus knocking down one of the
pile of books which she had taken to the top of the wall. Miss Nugent
picked it up, 'Marie Stuart! Is this your way of s