of the Mackenzies.
She was thin and straggling in her figure, with bones larger than
they should have been for purposes of youthful grace. There was
not wanting a certain brightness to her grey eyes, but it was a
brightness as to the use of which she had no early knowledge. At
this time her father lived at Camberwell, and I doubt whether the
education which Margaret received at Miss Green's establishment for
young ladies in that suburb was of a kind to make up by art for that
which nature had not given her. This school, too, she left at an
early age--at a very early age, as her age went. When she was nearly
sixteen, her father, who was then almost an old man, became ill, and
the next three years she spent in nursing him. When he died, she was
transferred to her younger brother's house,--to a house which he had
taken in one of the quiet streets leading down from the Strand to
the river, in order that he might be near his office. And here for
fifteen years she had lived, eating his bread and nursing him, till
he also died, and so she was alone in the world.

During those fifteen years her life had been very weary. A moated
grange in the country is bad enough for the life of any Mariana, but
a moated grange in town is much worse. Her life in London had been
altogether of the moated grange kind, and long before her brother's
death it had been very wearisome to her. I will not say that she
was always waiting for some one that came not, or that she declared
herself to be aweary, or that she wished that she were dead. But the
mode of her life was as near that as prose may be near to poetry, or
truth to romance. For the coming of one, who, as things fell out in
that matter, soon ceased to come at all to her, she had for a while
been anxious. There was a young clerk then in Somerset House, one
Harry Handcock by name, who had visited her brother in the early days
of that long sickness. And Harry Handcock had seen beauty in those
grey eyes, and the straggling, uneven locks had by that time settled
themselves into some form of tidiness, and the big joints, having
been covered, had taken upon themselves softer womanly motions,
and the sister's tenderness to the brother had been appreciated.
Harry Handcock had spoken a word or two, Margaret being then
five-and-twenty, and Harry ten years her senior. Harry had spoken,
and Margaret had listened only too willingly. But the sick brother
upstairs had become cross and peevish. Such a thin