to have clerical tendencies, which
made it quite suitable for a close. The choristers took their beer
there, and the landlord was a retired verger. Nearly the whole of
one side of a dark passage leading out of the Close towards the High
Street belonged to her; and though the passage be narrow and the
houses dark, the locality is known to be good for trade. And she
owned two large houses in the High Street, and a great warehouse
at St. Thomas's, and had been bought out of land by the Railway at
St. David's,--much to her own dissatisfaction, as she was wont to
express herself, but, undoubtedly, at a very high price. It will be
understood therefore, that Miss Stanbury was wealthy, and that she
was bound to the city in which she lived by peculiar ties.

But Miss Stanbury had not been born to this wealth, nor can she
be said to have inherited from her forefathers any of these high
privileges which had been awarded to her. She had achieved them by
the romance of her life and the manner in which she had carried
herself amidst its vicissitudes. Her father had been vicar of
Nuncombe Putney, a parish lying twenty miles west of Exeter, among
the moors. And on her father's death, her brother, also now dead, had
become vicar of the same parish,--her brother, whose only son, Hugh
Stanbury, we already know, working for the "D. R." up in London. When
Miss Stanbury was twenty-one she became engaged to a certain Mr.
Brooke Burgess, the eldest son of a banker in Exeter,--or, it might,
perhaps, be better said, a banker himself; for at the time Mr.
Brooke Burgess was in the firm. It need not here be told how various
misfortunes arose, how Mr. Burgess quarrelled with the Stanbury
family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how, when her
father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage, and lived
on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover was untrue
to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died and left her
every shilling that he possessed.

The Devonshire people, at the time, had been much divided as to the
merits of the Stanbury quarrel. There were many who said that the
brother could not have acted otherwise than he did; and that Miss
Stanbury, though by force of character and force of circumstances
she had weathered the storm, had in truth been very indiscreet. The
results, however, were as have been described. At the period of which
we treat, Miss Stanbury was a very rich lady, living by herself i