When the doctor’s affairs were set in order, it was found that the patrimony of his six girls amounted, as nearly as possible, to eight hundred pounds.

Eight hundred pounds is, to be sure, a sum of money; but how, in these circumstances, was it to be applied?

There came over from Cheltenham a bachelor uncle, aged about sixty.  This gentleman lived on an annuity of seventy pounds, which would terminate when he did.  It might be reckoned to him for righteousness that he spent the railway fare between Cheltenham and Clevedon to attend his brother’s funeral, and to speak a kind word to his nieces.  Influence he had none; initiative, very little.  There was no reckoning upon him for aid of any kind.

From Richmond in Yorkshire, in reply to a letter from Alice, wrote an old, old aunt of the late Mrs. Madden, who had occasionally sent the girls presents.  Her communication was barely legible; it seemed to contain fortifying texts of Scripture, but nothing in the way of worldly counsel.  This old lady had no possessions to bequeath.  And, as far as the girls knew, she was their mother’s only surviving relative.

The executor of the will was a Clevedon tradesman, a kind and capable friend of the family for many years, a man of parts and attainments superior to his station.  In council with certain other well-disposed persons, who regarded the Maddens’ circumstances with friendly anxiety, Mr. Hungerford (testamentary instruction allowing him much freedom of action) decided that the three elder girls must forthwith become self-supporting, and that the three younger should live together in the care of a lady of small means, who offered to house and keep them for the bare outlay necessitated.  A prudent investment of the eight hundred pounds might, by this arrangement, feed, clothe, and in some sort educate Martha, Isabel, and Monica.  To see thus far ahead sufficed for the present; fresh circumstances could be dealt with as they arose.

Alice obtained a situation as nursery-governess at sixteen pounds a year.  Virginia was fortunate enough to be accepted as companion by a gentlewoman at Weston-super-Mare; her payment, twelve pounds.  Gertrude, fourteen years old, also went to Weston, where she was offered employment in a fancy-goods shop—­her payment nothing at all, but lodging, board, and dress assured to her.

Ten years went by, and saw many changes.

Gertrude and Martha were dead; the former of consumption, the other drowned by the overturning of a pleasure-boat.  Mr. Hungerford also was dead, and a new guardian administered the fund which was still a common property of the four surviving daughters.  Alice plied her domestic teaching; Virginia remained a ‘companion.’  Isabel, now aged twenty, taught in a Board School at Bridgewater, and Monica, just fifteen, was on the point of being apprenticed to a draper at Weston, where Virginia abode.  To serve behind a counter would not have been Monica’s choice if any more