"'Oh, I've heard there are temptations; but a prudent young woman can take care of herself anywhere, Mr. George; and an imprudent young woman will go wrong in a country parsonage, or in a nunnery. If Miss Campbell is to earn her own living, she'll have to face dangers and temptations, go where she may. She'll have to take care of herself, poor child. There'll be nobody else to take care of her. I've heard that young women are well looked after in the better class of theatres—at Mr. Charles Kean's, for instance. I knew a young person that used to walk on in Louis the Eleventh—dressed as a page, in blue and gold—and she told me that Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean was that particular——'
"'The Keans are making a farewell tour in Australia, and will never go into management again, Martha. You are talking nonsense.'
"Poor Martha looked crestfallen at this reproof.
"'I dare say I am, Mr. George; but, for all that, I don't think Miss Campbell will ever do much as a governess. It isn't in her. There's a helplessness, and a bendingness, and droopingness, if I may say so, about her character that won't do for a governess. The only mistress that would keep her is the kind of mistress that would make a slave of her.'
"'Hard lines,' I said, getting up and walking about the little back parlour.
"It was a third room quite at the back of the substantial Georgian house; and there was scant space for my restlessness between the old square piano, which served as a sideboard, and the fireplace by which my dear old Martha sat looking at me with a perturbed countenance.
"I began to think I had let myself in for a bad thing. What was I to do with this girl, whose fate I had in some measure taken into my hands? It had seemed easy enough to bring her to this quiet shelter, which she might leave in a week or so, braced up and ready to fight her battle of life—the battle we all have to fight somehow—a self-supporting young woman. Self-supporting, that was the point. I now remembered with terror that there is a large class of persons upon this earth whom not even the scourge of poverty can make self-supporting; a vast multitude of feeble souls who resign themselves from the beginning of things to drift upon the stream of life, and are never known to strike out and swim for any shore, and so drift down to the ocean of death. Of these are the poor relations for whom something is for ever being done, and who never do anything for themselves; of these the feeble scions of patrician family trees, who are always waiting for sinecures under Government.
"God help her, poor soul, if she was one of these invertebrates; and God help me in my responsibility towards her.
"I was an only son; the heir to a small estate in Suffolk, and an income of something under three thousand a year. I was not quite twenty years of age, and I had to maintain myself at the most expensive college in Cambridge on an allowance that many of the rich young men with whom I associated would have considered abject penury. I was not in a fast set. I did not hunt—indeed, with my modest income, hunting would have been impossible; but I was not without tastes which absorbed money; the love of choice books and fine engravings, the fancy for curios picked up here or there, the presence of which gave interest to my rooms, and, perhaps, helped to reconcile me to many long hours within closed doors. I had hitherto been most careful to live within my income, for I knew that it was as much as my mother could afford to give me, taking into consideration her devotion to the estate which was to be mine by-and-by, and the maintenance and improvement of which had been to her as a religion. Her model cottages, her home-farm, the village church, to whose every improvement her purse had largely contributed, these were the sources of expenditure which kept her comparatively poor, and which forbade any kind of extravagance on my part.
"All these facts were in my mind that afternoon as I paced the narrow bounds of old Martha's sitting-room.