Produced by Daniel Fromont

Eleanor Frances Poynter is the author of My little lady (1871 novel), Ersilia (1876 novel), Among the hills (1881 novel), Madame de Presnel (1885 novel), The wooing of Catherine and other tales (1886), The failure of Elisabeth (1890 novel), An exquisite fool (1892 novel), Michael Ferrier (1902 novel); and translator of Wilhelmine von Hillern’s The vulture maiden (Die Geier-Wally) (1876) and Agnes Mary Duclaux (later Mrs James Darmesteter)’s Froissart (1895).

Two of her novels were translated in French:  My little lady as Madeleine Linders (1873); and Among the hills as Hetty (1883).

The Saturday Review vol.  XXX p. 794 comments My little lady as follows:  “There are certain female characters in novels which remind one of nothing so much as of a head of Greuze,—­fresh, simple, yet of the cunningly simple type, ‘innocent—­arch,’ and intensely natural....  ‘My Little Lady’ is a character of this Greuze-like kind....  The whole book is charming; quietly told, quietly thought, without glare or flutter, and interesting in both character and story,... and, if slight of kind, thoroughly good of its kind.”

COLLECTION

OF

BRITISH AUTHORS

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

VOL. 1148.

MY LITTLE LADY.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL.  I.

Thy sinless progress, through a world
By sorrow darken’d and by care disturbed,
Apt likeness bears to hers through gather’d clouds
Moving untouch’d in silver purity.

Wordsworth.

MY LITTLE LADY.

COPYRIGHT EDITION.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL.  I.

LEIPZIG

BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

1871.

The Right of Translation is reserved.

To

J.C.I.

PART I.

MY LITTLE LADY.

CHAPTER I.

In the Garden.

There are certain days in the lives of each one of us, which come in their due course without special warning, to which we look forward with no anticipations of peculiar joy or sorrow, from which beforehand we neither demand nor expect more than the ordinary portion of good and evil, and which yet through some occurrence—­unconsidered perhaps at the moment, but gaining in significance with years and connecting events—­are destined to live apart in our memories to the end of our existence.  Such a day in Horace Graham’s life was a certain hot Sunday in August, that he spent at the big hotel at Chaudfontaine.