Miss Harrop was a good, warm-hearted woman of about thirty, one of those unhappy persons who are made for domestic life, but condemned by fate to school-celibacy.  Lonely and impulsive, she drew to herself the most interesting girl in her classes, and, with complete indiscretion, made a familiar, a pet, a prodigy of one whose especial need was discipline.  By her confidences and her flatteries she set Clara aflame with spiritual pride.  Ceaselessly she excited her to ambition, remarked on her gifts, made dazzling forecast of her future.  Clara was to be a teacher first of all, but only that she might be introduced to the notice of people who would aid her to better things.  And the child came to regard this as the course inevitably before her.  Had she not already received school-prizes, among them a much-gilded little volume ‘for religious knowledge’?  Did she not win universal applause when she recited a piece of verse on prize-day—­Miss Harrop (disastrous kindness!) even saying that the delivery reminded her of Mrs. ——­, the celebrated actress!

Grace Rudd was busy in the same fatal work.  Four years older than Clara, weakly pretty, sentimental, conceited, she had a fancy for patronising the clever child, to the end that she might receive homage in return.  Poor Grace!  She left school, spent a year or two at home with parents as foolish as herself, and—­disappeared.  Prior to that, Miss Harrop had also passed out of Clara’s ken, driven by restlessness to try another school, away from London.

These losses appeared to affect Clara unfavourably.  She began to neglect her books, to be insubordinate, to exhibit arrogance, which brought down upon her plenty of wholesome reproof.  Her father was not without a share in the responsibility for it all.  Entering upon his four hundred pounds, one of the first things John did was to hire a piano, that his child might be taught to play.  Pity that Sidney Kirkwood could not then cry with effective emphasis, ’We are the working classes! we are the lower orders!’ It was exactly what Hewett would not bring himself to understand.  What!  His Clara must be robbed of chances just because her birth was not that of a young lady?  Nay, by all the unintelligible Powers, she should enjoy every help that he could possibly afford her.  Bless her bright face and her clever tongue!  Yes, it was now a settled thing that she should be trained for a schoolteacher.  An atmosphere of refinement must be made for her; she must be better dressed, more delicately fed.

The bitter injustice of it!  In the outcome you are already instructed.  Long before Clara was anything like ready to enter upon a teacher’s career, her father’s ill-luck once more darkened over the home.  Clara had made no progress since Miss Harrop’s day.  The authorities directing her school might have come forward with aid of some kind, had it appeared to them that the girl would repay such trouble; but they had their forebodings about