ed as much to her honour.
She had joined herself to him for better or worse, and it was her
manifest duty to bear such things; wives always have to bear them,
knowing when they marry that they must take their chance. Mr. Crawley
might have been a bishop, and Mrs. Crawley, when she married him,
perhaps thought it probable that such would be his fortune. Instead
of that he was now, just as he was approaching his fiftieth year, a
perpetual curate, with an income of one hundred and thirty pounds per
annum,--and a family. That had been Mrs. Crawley's luck in life, and
of course she bore it. But she had also done much more than this.
She had striven hard to be contented, or, rather, to appear to be
contented, when he had been most wretched and most moody. She
had struggled to conceal from him her own conviction as to his
half-insanity, treating him at the same time with the respect due
to an honoured father of a family, and with the careful measured
indulgence fit for a sick and wayward child. In all the terrible
troubles of their life her courage had been higher than his. The
metal of which she was made had been tempered to a steel which was
very rare and fine, but the rareness and fineness of which he had
failed to appreciate. He had often told her that she was without
pride, because she was stooped to receive from others on his behalf
and on behalf of their children, things which were needful, but which
she could not buy. He had told her that she was a beggar, and that it
was better to starve than to beg. She had borne the rebuke without
a word in reply, and had then begged again for him, and had endured
the starvation herself. Nothing in their poverty had, for years past,
been a shame to her; but every accident of their poverty was still,
and ever had been, a living disgrace to him.

[Illustration: Mr. and Mrs. Crawley.]

They had had many children, and three were still alive. Of the
eldest, Grace Crawley, we shall hear much in the coming story. She
was at this time nineteen years old, and there were those who said
that, in spite of her poverty, her shabby outward apparel, and a
certain thin, unfledged, unrounded form of person, a want of fulness
in the lines of her figure, she was the prettiest girl in that part
of the world. She was living now at a school in Silverbridge, where
for the last year she had been a teacher; and there were many in
Silverbridge who declared that very bright prospects were opening to
her,--t