‘I fear it is worse than that,’ whispered a young female teacher, who, as the neighbour of the missing Rose, was supposed to know more of her movements than anyone else. ‘I can’t say I am surprised; indeed, I may say it is only what I expected,’ continued the senior deacon, ‘considering how frivolous she was, and how little her family availed themselves of the means of grace.’ The senior deacon’s words commended themselves to all. Rose Wilcox was volatile. She was at that critical age when most pretty girls are so—a time of life always severely criticised by those who have passed it, or who have been preserved by kindly circumstances from its many dangers, and who ignore the godly and humane advice of Burns: ‘Then gently scan your brother Man, Still gentler sister Woman.’ The Rose thus criticised was, perhaps, the prettiest girl in all the town. Her father had been an officer in the navy, who had married for love a wife who had nothing to give him but a pretty face and a loving heart. For a time they lived humbly but comfortably on his half-pay. They had two children, a son and a daughter. The former grew up wild and wayward, and was a sad trouble to the family on the occasion of his visits on shore; for he was a sailor, like his father. Rose was her father’s companion. He taught her all that he knew himself: to read Shakespeare; to get a smattering of French; to play a little on the piano. But he became involved in debt through becoming a surety for an old friend who had no one else to stand between him and impending ruin, and that friend, alas! left him in the lurch, or, in other words, handed him over to his creditors, and he died broken-hearted, leaving his wife and daughter almost penniless and friendless. The mother then moved to Sloville, where she managed, with the assistance of her daughter, to secure a scanty living as milliner and dressmaker—a calling which she had followed before she became a wife, and where, almost to her alarm and at the same time much to her pride, she beheld her daughter grow handsomer and lovelier every day. The Sloville people said Rose was the prettiest girl in the town, and they were right. The landlord of the leading hotel would have given anything to have secured her services at the bar. The snobs of the place were much given to pester her with their impertinence, while lads of a lower grade inundated her with valentines and poetical effusions, as amorous as they were ill-spelt and badly written; and gay Lotharios in the shape of commercials, far removed from the chastening influences of their own lawful spouses, said to her all sorts of silly things on their occasional visits to the town and her mother’s shop.