omsoever proposed. She brought three times more
champagne and fowl and ham to the picnics than anyone else. She took
endless boxes for the play, and tickets for the masked balls, and
gave them away to everybody. She paid the boarding-house people months
beforehand; she helped poor shabby mustachiod bucks and dowagers whose
remittances had not arrived, with constant supplies from her purse; and
in this way she tramped through Europe, and appeared at Brussels, at
Paris, at Milan, at Naples, at Rome, as her fancy led her. News of
Amory's death reached her at the latter place, where Captain Clavering
was then staying, unable to pay his hotel bill, as, indeed, was his
friend, the Chevalier Strong; and the good-natured widow married the
descendant of the ancient house of Clavering--professing, indeed, no
particular grief for the scapegrace of a husband whom she had lost. We
have brought her thus up to the present time when she was mistress
of Clavering Park, in the midst of which Mr. Pinckney, the celebrated
painter, pourtrayed her with her little boy by her side.

Missy followed her mamma in most of her peregrinations, and so learned a
deal of life. She had a governess for some time; and after her mother's
second marriage, the benefit of Madame de Caramel's select pension in
the Champs Elysees. When the Claverings came to England, she of course
came with them. It was only within a few years, after the death of her
grandfather, and the birth of her little brother, that she began to
understand that her position in life was altered, and that Miss Amory,
nobody's daughter, was a very small personage in a house compared with
Master Francis Clavering, heir to an ancient baronetcy and a noble
estate. But for little Frank, she would have been an heiress, in spite
of her father: and though she knew, and cared not much about money,
of which she never had any stint, and though she was a romantic little
Muse, as we have seen, yet she could not reasonably be grateful to the
persons who had so contributed to change her condition: nor, indeed,
did she understand what the latter really was, until she had made some
further progress, and acquired more accurate knowledge in the world.

But this was clear, that her stepfather was dull and weak: that mamma
dropped her H's, and was not refined in manners or appearance; and that
little Frank was a spoiled quarrelsome urchin, always having his way,
always treading upon her feet, always upsetting hi