But a break came to those happy times: a joint stock bank, in which Mr. Martyn had invested, failed, and he was ruined. The shock was more than his somewhat weak heart could stand, and it killed him.
His daughter was just sixteen at the time, and the head pupil at Seaton Lodge. She was going to leave at the end of the half-year; but now all was changed. Instead of returning home to be mistress of her father's house, she would have to work for her living, and the opportunity for doing so came more quickly than she had dared to hope.
With Miss Clayton, the mistress, she had been a favourite from the first day she had entered the school, and the former now made her the offer of remaining on as a pupil teacher. Without hesitation the girl accepted. She had no relatives; Seaton Lodge was her second home; she was loved there, and she would not be dependent; and from that hour never had she to regret her decision.
When her father's affairs were settled up there remained but a few pounds a year for her, but these she was able to put by, for Miss Clayton was no niggard towards those that served her, and Selina received sufficient salary for clothes and pocket-money.
After the first agony of the shock had passed away, her life was a happy if a quiet one. Her companions all loved her; she was to them a friend rather than a governess, and few were the holidays when she did not receive more than one invitation to spend part of them at the homes of some of her pupil friends.
She had been a permanent resident at Seaton Lodge some three years when the romance of her life took place.
Among the elder pupils at that time was Maude Elliott, whose father's house was not many miles distant from her friend's former home. She had taken a great fancy to Selina, and on several occasions had carried her off to spend a portion of the holidays with her, and it was at her home that she had made the acquaintance of Edgar Freeman, Maude's cousin. A young mining engineer, he had spent some years in Newfoundland, and had returned to complete his studies for his full diploma at the School of Mines, spending such time as he could spare at his uncle's house.
Almost before she was aware of it, he had made a prisoner of the lonely little pupil-teacher's heart, and when she was convinced of the fact she fought against it, deeming herself a traitor to her friend, to whom she imagined he was attached, mistaking cousinly affection for something warmer.
Then came that breaking-up for the Christmas holidays which she remembered so well, when she was to have followed Maude in a few days to her home, where she and Edgar would once more be together; and then the great disappointment when, two days before she was to have started, Miss Clayton was taken ill with pneumonia, and she had to stay and nurse her.
How well she remembered that terrible time! It was the most dreary Christmas she had ever experienced—mild, dull, and sloppy, the rain falling by the hour, and fog blurring everything outside the house, while added to this was the anxiety she felt for the invalid.