of the Close towards the High Street belonged to her; and though the passage be narrow and the houses dark, the locality is known to be good for trade.  And she owned two large houses in the High Street, and a great warehouse at St. Thomas’s, and had been bought out of land by the Railway at St. David’s much to her own dissatisfaction, as she was wont to express herself, but, undoubtedly, at a very high price.  It will be understood therefore, that Miss Stanbury was wealthy, and that she was bound to the city in which she lived by peculiar ties.

But Miss Stanbury had not been born to this wealth, nor can she be said to have inherited from her forefathers any of these high privileges which had been awarded to her.  She had achieved them by the romance of her life and the manner in which she had carried herself amidst its vicissitudes.  Her father had been vicar of Nuncombe Putney, a parish lying twenty miles west of Exeter, among the moors.  And on her father’s death, her brother, also now dead, had become vicar of the same parish—­her brother, whose only son, Hugh.  Stanbury, we already know, working for the ‘D.  R.’ up in London.  When Miss Stanbury was twenty-one she became engaged to a certain Mr Brooke Burgess, the eldest son of a banker in Exeter or, it might, perhaps, be better said, a banker himself; for at the time Mr Brooke Burgess was in the firm.  It need not here be told how various misfortunes arose, how Mr Burgess quarrelled with the Stanbury family, how Jemima quarrelled with her own family, how, when her father died, she went out from Nuncombe Putney parsonage, and lived on the smallest pittance in a city lodging, how her lover was untrue to her and did not marry her, and how at last he died and left her every shilling that he possessed.

The Devonshire people, at the time, had been much divided as to the merits of the Stanbury quarrel.  There were many who said that the brother could not have acted otherwise than he did; and that Miss Stanbury, though by force of character and force of circumstances she had weathered the storm, had in truth been very indiscreet.  The results, however, were as have been described.  At the period of which we treat, Miss Stanbury was a very rich lady, living by herself in Exeter, admitted, without question, to be one of the county set, and still at variance with her brother’s family.  Except to Hugh, she had never spoken a word to one of them since her brother’s death.  When the money came into her hands, she at that time being over forty, and her nephew being then just ten years old, she had undertaken to educate him, and to start him in the world.  We know how she had kept her word, and how and why she had withdrawn herself from any further responsibility in the matter.