s rigidity came to know that
their places were very valuable. No one belonging to them need want
for aught, when once the good opinion of Miss Stanbury had been
earned. When once she believed in her servant there was nobody like
that servant. There was not a man in Exeter could clean a boot except
Giles Hickbody,--and if not in Exeter, then where else? And her own
maid Martha, who had lived with her now for twenty years, and who had
come with her to the brick house when she first inhabited it, was
such a woman that no other servant anywhere was fit to hold a candle
to her. But then Martha had great gifts,--was never ill, and really
liked having sermons read to her.

Such was Miss Stanbury, who had now discarded her nephew Hugh. She
had never been tenderly affectionate to Hugh, or she would hardly
have asked him to live in London on a hundred a year. She had never
really been kind to him since he was a boy, for although she had paid
for him, she had been almost penurious in her manner of doing so,
and had repeatedly given him to understand, that in the event of her
death not a shilling would be left to him. Indeed, as to that matter
of bequeathing her money, it was understood that it was her purpose
to let it all go back to the Burgess family. With the Burgess family
she had kept up no sustained connection, it being quite understood
that she was never to be asked to meet the only one of them now left
in Exeter. Nor was it as yet known to any one in what manner the
money was to go back, how it was to be divided, or who were to be the
recipients. But she had declared that it should go back, explaining
that she had conceived it to be a duty to let her own relations know
that they would not inherit her wealth at her death.

About a week after she had sent back poor Hugh's letter with the
endorsement on it as to unworthy bread, she summoned Martha to the
back parlour in which she was accustomed to write her letters. It was
one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used
only for the purposes for which they were intended. She never allowed
pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any
guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant
personal attack upon that guest, whether male or female, which would
have surprised that guest. Poor Hugh would have got on better with
her had he not been discovered once smoking in the garden. Nor would
she have writing materials in