regularly to ask Rebecca if Miss Pinkerton was at home. Once
Rebecca had the honour to pass a few days at Chiswick, after which she
brought back another doll which she called Miss Jemmy; for, though that
honest creature had made and given her jelly and cake enough for three
children, and a seven-shillings piece at parting, the girl's sense of
ridicule was far stronger than her gratitude; and she sacrificed Miss
Jemmy as pitilessly as her sister.

Then came the ending of Becky's studio days, and, an orphan, she was
transplanted to the Mall as her home.

The rigid formality of the place suffocated her; the prayers and meals,
the lessons and the walks, which were arranged with the regularity of a
convent, oppressed her almost beyond endurance; and she looked back to
the freedom and the beggary of her father's old studio with bitter
regret. She had never mingled in the society of women: her father,
reprobate as he was, was a man of talent; his conversation was a thousand
times more agreeable to her than the silly chat and scandal of the
schoolgirls, and the frigid correctness of the governesses equally
annoyed her. She had no soft maternal heart, this unlucky girl. The
prattle of the younger children, with whose care she was chiefly
entrusted, might have soothed and interested her; but she lived among
them two years, and not one was sorry that she went away. The gentle,
tender-hearted Amelia Sedley was the only person to whom she could attach
herself in the least; and who could help attaching herself to Amelia?

The happiness, the superior advantages of the young women round about
her, gave Rebecca inexpressible pangs of envy. "What airs that girl
gives herself, because she is an Earl's granddaughter," she said of
one. "How they cringe and bow to the Creole, because of her hundred
thousand pounds. I am a thousand times cleverer and more charming
than that creature, for all her wealth. I am as well bred as the
Earl's granddaughter, for all her fine pedigree; and yet everyone
passes me by here."

She determined to get free from the prison in which she found herself,
and now began to act for herself, and for the first time to make
connected plans for the future.

She took advantage, therefore, of the means of study the place offered
her; and as she was already a musician and a good linguist, she speedily
went through the little course of study considered necessary for ladies
in those days. Her music she practised incessan