raw-boned girl, and Emily had had the
situation frankly explained to her. At eighteen she had begun to work as
assistant teacher in a small school; the year following she had taken a
place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an
unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the
country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting
her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have
driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most
matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an
unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast
of her mistress a ray of human feeling. When the old woman at length
died, and Emily was to be turned out into the world, it was revealed
that she had been left a legacy of a few hundred pounds, and a letter
containing some rather practical, if harshly expressed, advice.

Go back to London [Mrs. Maytham had written in her feeble, crabbed
hand]. You are not clever enough to do anything remarkable in the way of
earning your living, but you are so good-natured that you can make
yourself useful to a lot of helpless creatures who will pay you a trifle
for looking after them and the affairs they are too lazy or too foolish
to manage for themselves. You might get on to one of the second-class
fashion-papers to answer ridiculous questions about house-keeping or
wall-papers or freckles. You know the kind of thing I mean. You might
write notes or do accounts and shopping for some lazy woman. You are a
practical, honest creature, and you have good manners. I have often
thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of
commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine
who lives in Mortimer Street would probably give you cheap, decent
lodgings, and behave well to you for my sake. She has reason to be fond
of me. Tell her I sent you to her, and that she must take you in for ten
shillings a week.

Emily wept for gratitude, and ever afterward enthroned old Mrs. Maytham
on an altar as a princely and sainted benefactor, though after she had
invested her legacy she got only twenty pounds a year from it.

"It was so _kind_ of her," she used to say with heartfelt humbleness of
spirit. "I never _dreamed_ of her doing such a generous thing. I hadn't
a _shadow_ of a claim upon her--not a _shadow_." It was her way to
express her honest em