The hands, stealing their steady way round the dial of the clock, pointed to ten minutes to nine.  Another member of the family appeared on the stairs—­Miss Garth, the governess.

No observant eyes could have surveyed Miss Garth without seeing at once that she was a north-countrywoman.  Her hard featured face; her masculine readiness and decision of movement; her obstinate honesty of look and manner, all proclaimed her border birth and border training.  Though little more than forty years of age, her hair was quite gray; and she wore over it the plain cap of an old woman.  Neither hair nor head-dress was out of harmony with her face—­it looked older than her years:  the hard handwriting of trouble had scored it heavily at some past time.  The self-possession of her progress downstairs, and the air of habitual authority with which she looked about her, spoke well for her position in Mr. Vanstone’s family.  This was evidently not one of the forlorn, persecuted, pitiably dependent order of governesses.  Here was a woman who lived on ascertained and honorable terms with her employers—­a woman who looked capable of sending any parents in England to the right-about, if they failed to rate her at her proper value.

“Breakfast at ten?” repeated Miss Garth, when the footman had answered the bell, and had mentioned his master’s orders.  “Ha!  I thought what would come of that concert last night.  When people who live in the country patronize public amusements, public amusements return the compliment by upsetting the family afterward for days together. You’re upset, Thomas, I can see your eyes are as red as a ferret’s, and your cravat looks as if you had slept in it.  Bring the kettle at a quarter to ten—­and if you don’t get better in the course of the day, come to me, and I’ll give you a dose of physic.  That’s a well-meaning lad, if you only let him alone,” continued Miss Garth, in soliloquy, when Thomas had retired; “but he’s not strong enough for concerts twenty miles off.  They wanted me to go with them last night.  Yes:  catch me!”

Nine o’clock struck; and the minute-hand stole on to twenty minutes past the hour, before any more footsteps were heard on the stairs.  At the end of that time, two ladies appeared, descending to the breakfast-room together—­Mrs. Vanstone and her eldest daughter.

If the personal attractions of Mrs. Vanstone, at an earlier period of life, had depended solely on her native English charms of complexion and freshness, she must have long since lost the last relics of her fairer self.  But her beauty as a young woman had passed beyond the average national limits; and she still preserved the advantage of her more exceptional personal gifts.  Although she was now in her forty-fourth year; although she had been tried, in bygone times, by the premature loss of more than one of her children, and by long attacks of illness which had followed those bereavements of former years—­she still