world was before her, and the new situation was no
longer a matter of wilful choice, but of dire necessity. She would not
be hastily thrust from her present post, and would be lovingly received
at Southminster in case of need, but she had no dependence save on her
own exertions, and perverse romance had died away into desolateness.
With strange, desperate vehemence, and determination not again to fail,
she bought the plainest of cap-fronts, reduced her bonnet to the severest
dowdiness, hid, straightened, tightened the waving pale gold of her hair,
folded her travelling-shawl old-womanishly, cast aside all the merely
ornamental, and glancing at herself, muttered, 'I did not know I could be
so insignificant!' Little Owen stared as if his beautiful aunt had lost
her identity, and Mrs. Murrell was ready to embrace her as a convert to
last night's exposition.

Perhaps the trouble was wasted, for the lady, Mrs. Bostock, did not seem
to be particular. She was quite young, easily satisfied, and only eager
to be rid of an embarrassing interview of a kind new to her; the terms
were fixed, and before many weeks had passed Lucilla was settled at a
cottage of gentility, in sight of her Thames, but on the Essex side,
where he was not the same river to her, and she found herself as often
thinking that those tainted waters had passed the garden in
Woolstone-lane as that they had sparkled under Wrapworth Bridge.

It was the greatest change she had yet undergone. She was entirely the
governess, never the companion of the elders. Her employers were
mercantile, wrapped up in each other, busy, and gay. The husband was all
day in London, and, when the evenings were not given to society,
preferred spending them alone with his wife and children. In his
absence, the nursery absorbed nearly all the time the mother could spare
from her company and her household. The children, who were too old for
playthings, were consigned to the first-rate governess, and only appeared
in the evening. Lucilla never left her schoolroom but for a walk, or on
a formal request to appear in the drawing-room at a party; a solitude
which she at first thought preferable to Mrs. Willis Beaumont's continued
small chatter, especially as the children were pleasant, brisk, and
lovable, having been well broken in by their Swiss _bonne_.

Necessity had trained Cilly in self-restraint, and the want of
surveillance made her generous nature the more scrupulous in her
tr