n. Poor Grace! She left school, spent a year or two at home
with parents as foolish as herself, and--disappeared. Prior to that,
Miss Harrop had also passed out of Clara's ken, driven by restlessness
to try another school, away from London.

These losses appeared to affect Clara unfavourably. She began to
neglect her books, to be insubordinate, to exhibit arrogance, which
brought down upon her plenty of wholesome reproof. Her father was not
without a share in the responsibility for it all. Entering upon his
four hundred pounds, one of the first things John did was to hire a
piano, that his child might be taught to play. Pity that Sidney
Kirkwood could not then cry with effective emphasis, 'We are the
working classes! we are the lower orders!' It was exactly what Hewett
would not bring himself to understand. What! His Clara must be robbed
of chances just because her birth was not that of a young lady? Nay, by
all the unintelligible Powers, she should enjoy every help that he
could possibly afford her. Bless her bright face and her clever tongue!
Yes, it was now a settled thing that she should be trained for a
schoolteacher. An atmosphere of refinement must be made for her; she
must be better dressed, more delicately fed.

The bitter injustice of it! In the outcome you are already instructed.
Long before Clara was anything like ready to enter upon a teacher's
career, her father's ill-luck once more darkened over the home. Clara
had made no progress since Miss Harrop's day. The authorities directing
her school might have come forward with aid of some kind, had it
appeared to them that the girl would repay such trouble; but they had
their forebodings about her. Whenever she chose, she could learn in
five minutes what another girl could scarcely commit to memory in
twenty; but it was obviously for the sake of display. The teachers
disliked her; among the pupils she had no friends. So at length there
came the farewell to school and the beginning of practical life, which
took the shape of learning to stamp crests and addresses on note-paper.
There was hope that before long Clara might earn thirteen shillings a
week.

The bitter injustice of it! Clara was seventeen now, and understood the
folly of which she had been guilty a few years ago, but at the same
time she felt in her inmost heart the tyranny of a world which takes
revenge for errors that are inevitable, which misleads a helpless child
and then condemns it for being