The odd little dolls' dressmaker was cheerful and merry with all her trials and loved Lizzie Hexam very much. Wrayburn, the young lawyer, used to come to see them, but she did not approve of him. She saw almost before Lizzie did herself that the latter was falling in love with Wrayburn, and the wise little creature feared that this would only bring pain to Lizzie, because she was an uneducated girl and Wrayburn a gentleman, who, when he married, would be expected to marry a lady far above Lizzie's station. Lizzie knew this, too, but she could not help loving Wrayburn, and as for the lawyer, he thought nothing of what the outcome might be.
Meanwhile Lizzie's brother Charley, for whom she had worked so hard, was doing well at school, but now that he was getting up in the world he had turned out to be a selfish boy and was afraid that his sister might draw him down.
One day he came to visit her, bringing with him the master of his school. The master's name was Headstone. He was a gloomy, passionate, revengeful man who dressed always in black and had no friends. Unfortunately enough, the first time he saw Lizzie he fell in love with her. It was unfortunate in more ways than one, for Lizzie disliked him greatly, and he was, as it proved, a man who would stop at nothing—not even at the worst of crimes—to attain an object.
When Lizzie's brother found Headstone wanted to marry her, in his selfishness he saw only what a fine thing it would be for himself, and when she refused, he said many harsh things and finally left her in anger, telling her she was no longer a sister of his.
This was not the worst either, for she knew Headstone had been made almost angry by her dislike, and she was in dreadful fear lest he do harm to Eugene Wrayburn, whom he suspected she loved.
In her anxiety Lizzie left her lodging with the dolls' dressmaker, and found employment in a paper-mill in a village on the river, some miles from London, letting neither Wrayburn nor Headstone know where she had gone.
The schoolmaster imagined that the lawyer (whom he now hated with a deadly hatred) knew where she was, and in order to discover if he visited her he began to dog the other's footsteps. At night, after teaching all day in school, Headstone would lie in wait outside the lawyer's door and whenever he came out would follow him.
Wrayburn soon discovered this and delighted to fool his enemy. Every night he would take a new direction and lead his pursuer for hours about the city. So that in a few weeks Headstone became almost insane with murderous anger and disappointment.
So things went on for a long while. Lizzie continued to love Eugene Wrayburn, who kept trying in every way to find her. Headstone, the schoolmaster, kept watching him and meditating evil. The little dolls' dressmaker worked on cheerily every day in the city, and in their fine house Mr. and Mrs. Boffin grew fonder and fonder of Miss Bella, whom John Rokesmith, the secretary, thought more beautiful every day.