he world had been gladly seized upon by my poor
father, who consented to pay the modest premium required by the Miss
Bagshots, in order that I might be taught the duties of a governess,
and essay my powers of tuition upon the younger pupils at Albury
Lodge.

How well I remember the evening of my arrival!--a bleak dreary
evening at the close of January, made still more dismal by a
drizzling rain that had never ceased falling since I left my
father's snug little house at Briarwood in Warwickshire. I had had
to change trains three times, and to wait during a blank and
miserable hour and a quarter, or so, at small obscure stations,
staring hopelessly at the advertisements on the walls--advertisements
of somebody's life-sustaining cocoa, and somebody else's health-
restoring cod-liver oil, or trying to read the big brown-backed
Bible in the cheerless little waiting-room; and trying, O so hard,
not to think of home, and all the love and happiness I had left
behind me. The journey had been altogether tiresome and fatiguing;
but, for all that, the knowledge that I was near my destination
brought me no sense of pleasure. I think I should have wished that
dismal journey prolonged indefinitely, if I could thereby have
escaped the beginning of my new life.

A lumbering omnibus conveyed me from the station to Albury Lodge,
after depositing a grim-looking elderly lady at a house on the
outskirts of the town, and a dapper-looking little man, whom I took
for a commercial traveller, at an inn in the market-place. I watched
the road with a kind of idle curiosity as the vehicle lumbered
along. The town had a cheerful prosperous air even on this wet
winter night, and I saw that there were two fine old churches, and a
large modern building which I supposed to be the town-hall.

We left the town quite behind us before we came to Albury Lodge; a
very large house on the high-road, a square red-brick house of the
early Georgian era, shut in from the road by high walls. The great
wrought-iron gates in the front had been boarded up, and Albury
Lodge was now approached by a little wooden side-door into a stone-
flagged covered passage that led to a small door at the end of the
house. The omnibus-driver deposited me at this door, with all my
worldly possessions, which at this period of my life consisted of
two rather small boxes and a japanned dressing-case, a receptacle
that contained all my most sacred treasures.

I was admitted by a rather