how she should try to restrain her grief at the loss of her pet, as her distress gave him pain.  She had then been a person of consequence in her little world, she being her father’s only child; she had been made much of by friends and acquaintances, amongst whom, so far as she could recollect, no member of the Devitt family was numbered.  Perhaps, she thought, they have lately come to Melkbridge.  Then aspects of the old home passed through her mind.  The room in which she used to sleep; the oak-panelled dining-room; the garden, which was all her very own, passed in rapid review; then, the faces of playmates and sweethearts, for she had had admirers at that early age.  There was Charlie Perigal, the boy with the steely blue eyes and the pretty curls, with whom she had quarrelled on the ground that he was in the habit of catching birds in nasty little brick traps; also, because, when taxed with this offence, he had defended his conduct and, a few moments later, had attempted to stone a frog in her highly indignant presence.

Then there was Archie Windebank, whose father had the next place to theirs; he was a fair, solemn boy, who treated her with an immense deference; he used to blush when she asked him to join her in play.  The day before she had left for school, he had confessed his devotion in broken accents; she had thought of him for quite a week after she had left home.  How absurd and trivial it all seemed, now that she was to face the stern realities of life!

The next thing she recalled was the news of her father’s ruin.  This calamity was more conveyed to her by the changed look in his face, when she next saw him, than by anything else.

She had been, at once, taken away from the expensive school at which she was being educated and had been sent to Brandenburg College, then languishing in Hammersmith Terrace, while her father went to live at Dinan, in Brittany, where he might save money in order to make some sort of a start, which might ultimately mean a provision for his daughter.

Next, she remembered—­this she would never forget—­the terrible day on which Miss Helen Mee had called her into the study to tell her that she would never again see her dear father in this world.  Tears came to Mavis’s eyes whenever she thought of it.  Orphaned, friendless, with no one to give her the affection for which her lonely soul craved, Mavis had stayed on at Brandenburg College, where the little her father had left sufficed to pay for her board and schooling.  This sum lasted till she was sixteen, when, having passed one or two trumpery examinations, she was taken on the staff of the college.  The last few months, Mavis’s eyes had been opened to the straitened circumstances in which her employers lived; she had lately realised that she owed her bread and butter more to the kindness of the Miss Mees, than to the fact of her parts as a teacher being in request at the school.  She informed the kind ladies that she was going to seek her bread elsewhere; upon their offering the mildest of protests, she had made every effort to translate her intentions into performance.