Clara Amedroz at this time was not a very young lady.  She had already passed her twenty-fifth birthday, and in manners, appearance, and habits was, at any rate, as old as her age.  She made no pretence to youth, speaking of herself always as one whom circumstances required to take upon herself age in advance of her years.  She did not dress young, or live much with young people, or correspond with other girls by means of crossed letters; nor expect that, for her, young pleasures should be provided.  Life had always been serious with her; but now, we may say, since the terrible tragedy lit the family, it must be solemn as well as serious.  The memory of her brother must always be upon her; and the memory also of the fact that her father was now an impoverished man, on whose behalf it was her duty to care that every shilling spent in the house did its full twelve pennies’ worth of work.  There was a mixture in this of deep tragedy and of little cares, which seemed to destroy for her the poetry as well as the pleasure of life.  The poetry and tragedy might have gone hand in hand together; and so might the cares and pleasures of life have done, had there been no black sorrow of which she must be ever mindful.  But it was her lot to have to scrutinize the butcher’s bill as she was thinking of her brother’s fate; and to work daily among small household things while the spectre of her brother’s corpse was ever before her eyes.

A word must be said to explain how it had come to pass that the life led by Miss Amedroz had been more than commonly serious before that tragedy had befallen the family.  The name of the lady who stood to Clara in the place of an aunt has been already mentioned.  When a girl has a mother, her aunt may be little or nothing to her.  But when the mother is gone, if there be an aunt unimpeded with other family duties, then the family duties of that aunt begin and are assumed sometimes with great vigour.  Such had been the case with Mrs Winterfield.  No woman ever lived, perhaps, with more conscientious ideas of her duty as a woman than Mrs Winterfield of Prospect Place, Perivale.  And this, as I say it, is intended to convey no scoff against that excellent lady.  She was an excellent lady unselfish, given to self-restraint, generous, pious, looking to find in her religion a safe path through life a path as safe as the facts of Adam’s fall would allow her feet to find.  She was a woman fearing much for others, but fearing also much for herself, striving to maintain her house in godliness, hating sin, and struggling with the weakness of her humanity so that she might not allow herself to hate the sinners.  But her hatred for the sin she found herself bound at all times to pronounce to show it by some act at all seasons.  To fight the devil was her work was the appointed work of every living soul, if only living souls could be made to acknowledge the necessity of the task.  Now an aunt of that kind, when she assumes her duties towards a motherless niece, is apt to make life serious.