in temper a trifle exigent perhaps, sanguine, and capable of exertion; she could not claim more than superficial instruction, but taught reading and writing with the usual success which attends teachers of these elements.  After the birth of her first child, Emily, her moral nature showed an unaccountable weakening; the origin was no doubt physical, but in story-telling we dwell very much on the surface of things; it is not permitted us to describe human nature too accurately.  The exigence of her temper became something generally described by a harsher term; she lost her interest in the work which she had unwillingly entrusted for a time to an assistant; she found the conditions of her life hard.  Alas, they grew harder.  After Emily, two children were successively born; fate was kind to them, and neither survived infancy.  Their mother fell into fretting, into hysteria; some change in her life seemed imperative, and at length she persuaded her husband to quit the town in which they lived, and begin life anew elsewhere.  Begin life anew!  James Hood was forty years old; he possessed, as the net result of his commercial enterprises, a capital of a hundred and thirty pounds.  The house, of course, could be let, and would bring five-and-twenty pounds a year.  This it was resolved to do.  He had had certain dealings in Dunfield, and in Dunfield he would strike his tent—­that is to say, in Banbrigg, whence he walked daily to a little office in the town.  Rents were lower in Banbrigg, and it was beyond the range of certain municipal taxings.

Mrs. Hood possessed still her somewhat genteel furniture.  One article was a piano, and upon this she taught Emily her notes.  It had been a fairly good piano once, but the keys had become very loose.  They were looser than ever, now that Emily tried to play on them, on her return from Surrey.

Business did not thrive in Dunfield; yet there was more than ever need that it should, for to neglect Emily’s education would be to deal cruelly with the child—­she would have nothing else to depend upon in her battle with the world.  Poor Emily A feeble, overgrown child, needing fresh air, which she could not get, needing food of a better kind, just as unattainable.  Large-eyed, thin-checked Emily; she, too, already in the clutch of the great brute world, the helpless victim of a civilisation which makes its food of those the heart most pities.  How well if her last sigh had been drawn in infancy, if she had lain with the little brother and sister in that gaunt, grimy cemetery, under the shadow of mill chimneys!  She was reserved for other griefs; for consolations, it is true, but—­