mily, with a turn for puddings,
poultry, and the management of servants. Lucy clung to her mother, and
books (though both were constant students of _The Family Herald_), and
was nothing if not romantic. Both found some one to love them, and both,
as it happened, were married on the same day. Their parents had died
within a year of each other, and then the orphaned girls had come to
terms with their lovers, and accepted a yoke of which they had
previously fought shy. Bessy's husband was a middle-aged bookseller in
the neighboring town of Thorley, who had admired her thrifty and homely
ways, and had not been deterred by her want of intelligence. Lucy,
though her dreams had soared higher, was fairly happy with a
schoolmaster from Southampton, whose acquaintance she had made on a
holiday at the seaside.

Alan, who was the only offspring of this latter union, had been well
brought up, for his father's careful teaching and his mother's
gentleness and imagination supplied the complementary touches which are
necessary to form the basis of culture. The sisters had not drifted
apart after their marriage so much as might have been expected. They had
visited each other, and Alan, as he grew up, conceived a strong
affection for his uncle at Thorley, who--a childless man himself--gave
him delightful books, and showed him others still more delightful, who
talked to him on the subjects which chiefly attracted him, and was the
first to fire his brain with an ambition to write and be famous. Aunt
Bessy was tolerated for her husband's sake, but it was Uncle Samuel who
drew the lad to Thorley. In due time Alan began to teach in his father's
school, and before he was twenty-one had taken his degree at London
University. Then his mother died, and shortly afterwards he was left
comparatively alone in the world.

Now, school-keeping had never been a congenial occupation to Alan, whose
poetic temperament was chafed by the strict and ungrateful routine of
the business. His father had been to the manner born, and things had
prospered with him, but Alan by himself would not have been able to
achieve a like success. He knew this, and was proud of his incapacity;
and he took the first opportunity of handing over the establishment to a
successor. The money which he received for the transfer, added to that
which his father had left, secured him an income on which it was
possible to live, and to travel, and to print a volume of poems. For a
short tim