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traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped
support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please
her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung
across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of
corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining
wilderness of rock and fern.

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told
that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the Mountain;
and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs.
Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that
was afterward to be hers.

Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity
had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs.
Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh
and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened
Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village) to
commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down," and
to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that
Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her,
though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had
come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton,
where he had begun his legal career.

After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a
boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long conference
with Mr. Royall, who, in pursuance of her plan, departed one day for
Starkfield to visit the institution she recommended. He came back the
next night with a black face; worse, Charity observed, than she had ever
seen him; and by that time she had had some experience.

When she asked him how soon she was to start he answered shortly, "You
ain't going," and shut himself up in the room he called his office;
and the next day the lady who kept the school at Starkfield wrote that
"under the circumstances" she was afraid she could not make room just
then for another pupil.

Charity was disappointed; but she understood. It wasn't the temptations
of Starkfield that had been Mr. Royall's undoing; it was the thought of
losing her. He was a dreadfully "lonesome" man; she had made that out
because she was so "lonesome" herself. He and she, face to face in that
sad house, had sounded the de