fault. She
should have managed better with the resources at her disposal than to
bring herself to such a pass, and that so soon; either Mary or Rose
would certainly have done so in her place. But Nature had not made her
or Frances--whose rapacities had been one cause of the financial
breakdown--for the role of domestic economists; they had been dowered
with their lovely faces for other purposes.

That the fine plumage is for the sun was a fact well understood by
Frances, at any rate. And she was wild at the wrongs wrought by sordid
circumstances--her father's and sister's heedlessness--upon herself.
She thought only of herself. Deb was getting old, and she deserved to
suffer anyway; but what had Frances done to be deprived of her
birth-right, of all her chances of success in life? Eighteen, and no
coming out--beautiful, and nobody to see it--marriageable, and out of
the track of all the eligible men, amongst whom she might have had her
pick and choice. She had reason for her passionate rebelliousness
against this state of things; for, while a pretty face is theoretically
its own fortune anywhere, we all see for ourselves how many are passed
over simply for want of an attractive setting. It was quite on the
cards that she might share the fate of those beauties in humble life to
whom romantic accidents do not occur, for all her golden hair and
aristocratic profile, her figure of a sylph and complexion of a wild
rose.

The fear of this future combined with the acute discomfort of the
present to make her desperate. She cast about for a way of escape, a
pathway to the sun. One only offered--the landlord.

He was an elderly landlord, who had lately buried a frumpy old wife,
and he was as deeply tainted with trade as Peter Breen; but he had
retired long since from personal connection with breweries and
public-houses--and a brewer, in the social scale, was only just below a
wholesale importer, if that--and he was manifestly rolling in money,
after the manner of his kind. Half the streets around belonged to him,
and his house towered up in the midst of his other houses, a great
white block, with a pillared portico--a young palace by comparison.
Above all, he had no known children.

From the first he had taken an interest in his pretty girl-tenants. He
had liked to call in person to inquire if the cellar kept dry and the
chimney had ceased smoking; and he had been most generous in offering
improvements and repairs before the