lins like a discrowned queen. That she had
reached the age of two-and-twenty without having been in love was no
source of surprise to those who knew her; for Mirpah Madgin hardly
looked like a girl who would marry a poor clerk or a petty tradesman, or
who could ever sink into the commonplace drudge of a hand-to-mouth
household. She looked like a girl who would some day be claimed by a
veritable hero of romance--by some Ivanhoe of modern life, well endowed
with this world's goods--who would wed her, and ride away with her to
the fairy realms of Tyburnia and Rotten Row.

And yet, truth to tell, the thread of romance inwoven with the
composition of Mirpah Madgin was a very slender one. In so far she
belied her own beauty. For a young woman she was strangely practical,
and that in a curiously unfeminine way. She was her father's managing
clerk and _alter ego_. The housewifely acts of sewing and cooking she
held in utter distaste. For domestic management in any of its forms she
had no faculty, unless it were for that portion of it which necessitated
a watchful eye upon the purse-strings. Such an eye she had been trained
to use since she was quite a girl, and Mirpah the superb could on
occasion haggle over a penny as keenly as the most ancient fishwife in
Eastbury market.

At five minutes past nine precisely, six mornings out of every seven,
Mirpah Madgin sat down in her father's office and proceeded to open the
letters. Mr. Madgin's business was a multifarious one. Not only was he
Lady Chillington's general agent and man of business, although that was
his most onerous and lucrative appointment, and the one that engaged
most of his time and thoughts, but he was also agent for several lesser
concerns, always contriving to have a number of small irons in the fire
at one time. Much of Mr. Madgin's time was spent in the collection of
rents and in out-door work generally, so that nearly the whole of the
office duties devolved upon Mirpah, and by no clerk could they have been
more efficiently performed. She made up and balanced the numerous
accounts with which Mr. Madgin had to deal in one shape or another.
Three-fourths of the letters that emanated from Mr. Madgin's office were
written by her. From long practice she had learned to write so like her
father that only an expert could have detected the difference between
the two hands; and she invariably signed herself, "Yours truly, Solomon
Madgin." Indeed, so accustomed was she to