They had had many children, and three were still alive.  Of the eldest, Grace Crawley, we shall hear much in the coming story.  She was at this time nineteen years old, and there were those who said, that in spite of her poverty, her shabby outward apparel, and a certain thin, unfledged, unrounded form of person, a want of fulness in the lines of her figure, she was the prettiest girl in that part of the world.  She was living now at a school in Silverbridge, where for the last year she had been a teacher; and there were many in Silverbridge who declared that very bright prospects were opening to her—­that young Major Grantly of Crosby Lodge, who, though a widower with a young child, was the cynosure of all female eyes in and around Silverbridge, had found beauty in her thin face, and that Grace Crawley’s fortune was made in the teeth, as it were, of the prevailing ill-fortune of the family.  Bob Crawley, who was two years younger, was now at Malbro’ School, from whence it was intended that he should proceed to Cambridge, and be educated there at the expense of his godfather Dean Arabin.  In this also the world saw a stroke of good luck.  But then nothing was lucky to Mr Crawley.  Bob, indeed, who had done well at school, might do well at Cambridge—­might achieve great things there.  But Mr Crawley would almost have preferred that the boy should work in the fields, than that he should be educated in a manner so manifestly eleemosynary.  And then his clothes!  How was he to be provided with clothes fit either for school or for college?  But the dean and Mrs Crawley between them managed this, leaving Mr Crawley very much in the dark, as Mrs Crawley was in the habit of leaving him.  Then there was a younger daughter, Jane, still at home, who passed her life between her mother’s work-table and her father’s Greek, mending linen, and learning to scan iambics—­for Mr Crawley in his early days had been a ripe scholar.

And now there had come upon them all this terribly crushing disaster.  That poor Mr Crawley had gradually got himself into a mess of debt at Silverbridge, from which he had been quite unable to extricate himself, was generally known by all the world both of Silverbridge and Hogglestock.  To a great many it was known that Dean Arabin had paid money for him, very much contrary to his own consent, and that he had quarrelled, or attempted to quarrel, with the dean in consequence—­had so attempted, although the money had in part passed through his own hands.  There had been one creditor, Fletcher, the butcher at Silverbridge, who had of late been specially hard upon poor Crawley.  This man, who had not been without good nature in his dealings, had heard stories of the dean’s good-will and such like, and had loudly expressed his opinion that the perpetual curate of Hogglestock would show a higher pride in allowing himself to be indebted to a rich brother clergyman, than in remaining under the thrall of a butcher.  And thus a rumour had grown up.