s said,
very black stains lie here and there athwart the white conventionalities
of common life!

This had happened when our little Kenrick was eight years old; he never
forgot the spectacle of his poor father's heartbreaking misery during
the last year of his life. He never forgot how, during that year,
sorrow and anxiety had aged his father's face, and silvered his hair,
young as he was, with premature white, and so quenched his spirits, that
often he would take his little boy on his knee, and look upon him so
long in silence, that the child cried at the intensity of that long,
mournful, hopeless gaze, and at the tears which he saw slowly coursing
each other down his father's careworn and furrowed cheeks. Ever since
then the boy had walked among the Fuzby people with open scorn and
defiance, as among those whose slanders had done to death the father
whom he so proudly loved. In spite of his mother's wishes, he would not
stoop to pay them even the semblance of courtesy. No wonder that he
hated Fuzby with a perfect hatred, and that his home there was a
miserable home.

Yet, if any one _could_ have made happy a home in such a place, it would
have been Mrs Kenrick. Never, I think, did a purer, a fairer, a
sweeter soul live on earth, or one more like the angels of heaven. The
winning grace of her manners, the simple sweetness of her address, the
pathetic beauty and sadness of her face, would have won for her, and
_had_ won for her, in any other place but Fuzby, the love and admiration
which were her due.

"She had a mind that envy could not but call fair."

But at Fuzby, from the dominant faction of Hugginson, and the small
vulgar-minded sets who always tried to brow-beat those who were poor,
particularly if their birth and breeding were gentle, she found nothing
but insulting coldness, or still more insulting patronage. When first
she heard the marriage-bells clang out from the old church tower of her
home, and had walked by the side of her young husband, a glad and lovely
bride, she had looked forward to many happy years. With _him_, at any
rate, it seemed that no place could be very miserable. Poor lady! her
life had been one long martyrdom, all the more hard to bear because it
was made up for the most part of small annoyances, petty mortifications,
little recurring incessant bitternesses. And now, during the seven
years of her widowhood, she had gained a calmer and serener atmosphere,
in which she was