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Was there ever in this world so delightful a family circle as that of the Deanery?  The daughters were all pretty, but that was their smallest merit.  They were all clever, and well-read, without a tinge of the bluestocking, and most of them were musical to the tips of their slender fingers.  How merrily their laughter used to ring across the ancient close, and how playfully and gently they used to rally the dear learned old Dean who had watched over them and cared for them since Mrs. MAYBLOOM’S death, many years before, with all the tender care of the most devoted mother.  And of this fair and smiling throng, “my only rosary,” as the Dean used to call them, HERMIONE was, I think, the prettiest, as she was certainly the most accomplished.  Every kind of gift had been showered upon her by Nature.  When she played her violin, accompanied by her elder sister on the piano, tears trickled unbidden down the aquiline nose of the militant Bishop of Archester, the chapter stood hushed to a man, and the surrounding curates were only prevented by a salutary fear of ruining their chances of preferment from laying themselves, their pittances, and their garnered store of slippers at her pretty feet.  Then in a fit of charming petulance, she would break off in the middle of the piece, lay down her violin, and, with a pretty imperiousness, command a younger sister to fetch her zither, on which to complete the subjugation of her adorers.  And then her caricatures—­summer-lightning flashes of pencilled wit, as I heard the Reverend Simeon Cope describe them in a moment of enthusiasm after she had shown us her sketch of his rival, the Reverend Stephen Hankinson.

But even in those days, while she still had about her all the fascinations of peerless beauty and fresh and glowing youth, I mistrusted her.  Alone of all the sisters she seemed to me to be wanting in heart.  I heard her several times attempt to snub her father, and once I noted how she spent a whole evening in moody silence, and refused to play a note, for no other reason that I could see except that Captain ARBLAST, of the 30th Lancers, the dashing first-born of the Bishop, who happened to be spending a few days of his long leave in Archester, devoted himself with all the assiduity of his military nature to twirling his heavy moustache in the immediate neighbourhood of Sophy MAYBLOOM, and not in that of HERMIONE.  Indeed, I have reason to know that, after the guests had departed, poor Sophy had to endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have not yet faded from her memory.  And then I remembered, too, how it was a matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and mottled, and she imagined that she would never be able to wear a low dress, or shine in Society.