x years old, and her mother was
still an utter stranger to her.

The family at Bradmond, however, were not without tidings of Lady
Enville. It so happened that Mr Avery's adopted son, Robert Tremayne,
was Rector of the very parish in which Sir Thomas Enville lived; and a
close correspondence--for Elizabethan days--was kept up between Bradmond
and the Rectory. In this manner they came to know, as time went on,
that Clare had a little sister, whose name was Blanche; that Lady
Enville was apparently quite happy; that Sir Thomas was very kind to
her, after his fashion, though that was not the devoted fashion of
Walter Avery. Sir Thomas liked to adorn his pretty plaything with fine
dresses and rich jewellery; he surrounded her with every comfort; he
allowed her to go to every party within ten miles, and to spend as much
money as she pleased. And this was precisely Orige's beau ideal of
happiness. Her small cup seemed full--but evidently Clare was no
necessary ingredient in the compound.

If any one had taken the trouble to weigh, sort, and label the
prejudices of Barbara Polwhele, it would have been found that the
heaviest of all had for its object "Papistry,"--the second, dirt,--and
the third, "Mistress Walter." Lieutenant Avery had been Barbara's
darling from his cradle, and she considered that his widow had outraged
his memory, by marrying again so short a time after his death. For
this, above all her other provocations, Barbara never heartily forgave
her. And a great struggle it was to her to keep her own feelings as
much as possible in the background, from the conscientious motive that
she ought not to instil into Clare's baby mind the faintest feeling of
aversion towards her mother. The idea of the child being permanently
sent to Enville Court was intensely distasteful to her. Yet wherever
Clare went, Barbara must go also.

She had promised Mrs Avery, Clare's grandmother, on her dying bed,
never to leave the child by her own free will so long as her childhood
lasted, and rather than break her word, she would have gone to Siberia--
or to Enville Court. In Barbara's eyes, there would have been very
little choice between the two places. Enville Court lay on the
sea-coast, and Barbara abhorred the sea, on which her only brother and
Walter Avery had died: it was in Lancashire, which she looked upon as a
den of witches, and an arid desert bare of all the comforts of life; it
was a long way from any large town,