Then Eleanor Churchill--who, while perfectly conscious of her husband's frailties and imperfections, had never ceased worshipping him--fairly broke down; and had she not been attended by a skilful physician, and perseveringly nursed night and day by the girl who had been "scrub" at Miss Inderwick's school, and had left when Eleanor left to follow her fortunes, little Frank would have been motherless as well as fatherless. As it was, she recovered, and went away, as soon as she was able to move, to a little fishing-village in Devon, of which an old friend of her father's was vicar. Her income was a mere pittance; contributions from old friends of her husband's family and her own grudgingly yielded; but her expenses were trifling, and the old parson took the boy's education under his own charge, and gave him an excellent classical groundwork. The vicar died when Frank was about fifteen, and left the whole of his little savings--some seven hundred pounds--to Eleanor Churchill, "for the furtherance of her son's education;" and then the widow carried out her long-cherished plan of sending her son to some foreign university, where, in addition to his Classics, he could perfect himself in some of the modern languages. Frank was absent at Leipzig nearly four years, during which period he paid two flying visits to England, at the second of which he was introduced to his godfather, Sir Marmaduke Wentworth, who had succeeded to the family title on his uncle's death. Frank little thought that one of Sir Marmaduke's first acts on coming into his property had been to settle two hundred a year on Mrs. Churchill for her life; he would hear of no refusal. "It is merely an act of reparation," said he; "and but a scanty one. It was my folly, my bad example, that led poor Vance astray; and I should never rest if I thought that those he left behind him were in want, while I had means." But one condition was attached to this gift, and that was that Frank should never know of it. "I recollect Vance's spirit in his best days," Marmaduke said; "and if the boy is like him, he'd fling my money at my head."