“Here my landlady rubbed her nose viciously upon her apron, and stared straight out of the very dirty window.
“As this was evidently a challenge to me to reply, I said, as firmly as I could, a few words which brought out the reason for the woman’s visit that morning.
“‘Am I to understand, then, that you wish me to leave.’
“‘If you please, miss, at the end of the week, for there’s the gent on the first floor would like to have this bedroom.’
“‘Very well, Mrs Ruddock,’ I said, ‘I will find a room elsewhere.’
“‘Thanky, miss,’ she said sharply; and giving her nose another vicious rub, she left me to my thoughts—and my tears.
“For I was weak, faint, and heart-sick, and the coins in my purse had dwindled down, so that if I did not succeed in obtaining an engagement in a very few days, I had no resource but to creep back to the country and avow my failure.
“Just three months since, and we were all so happy in the little country vicarage; and then, in visiting one of his people, my poor father caught a dangerous fever, while in tending him my dear mother was stricken with the same complaint, and ere three weeks had passed Minna and I sat in the little study alone, in deep black; for the struggle had been brief, and those we loved lay together in the green churchyard, and we were only intruders now in the vicarage that had been our home.
“We were nearly penniless, too, but a brother clergyman of my father’s, quite as poor, came forward and offered us a temporary home till, as he said, some opening should occur for us.
“I gladly accepted it for Minna; but, for myself, I was determined to try great London and, unaided, fight my way. In two years John Murray was to come back from Australia to fetch me for his wife, and till then I would be independent. So the day came at last when, with many tears, we two girls had to separate, and with aching heart I left the old Lincolnshire home, and reached the great dreary void of London early one afternoon.