A gentlewoman of slender means, and with no near relations, she had to make her own way in the world and effect a lodgment in it somewhere by the aid of such wits as relenting nature had bestowed, when she withheld the brute strength that is given to vulgar humanity. In fact, my poor Julia was, I fear, something of a schemer. Is it not shocking? And yet, dear lady, if I may ask--how long would that charming candour and transparency of soul, not to speak of the high-spirited independence of character, which so delight your friends, survive, if you had to depend on the hospitality of some one, whom no social law ordained to offer it? We must all eat three times a day if possible, and those who have no money themselves must arrange that some one else who has, shall pay for the dinner, or worse will come of it. Inchbracken had been the oyster offered by fortune to Julia, and very well she had acquitted herself in the task of opening it. Friends and every comfort she had been able to achieve thereby, with every prospect of their continuance so long as her kinswoman should survive. But then good things of life are not enough, so soon at least as they are once secured. Man is not an oyster, whatever his remote ancestors may have been, nor woman either; and as regards ancestors, without impugning the oyster's claim, if we are to infer anything from a never-failing hereditary trait, a place should be found somewhere in the pedigree for the horseleech; all human desire, aim, aspiration, may be expressed by the one simple formula--'a little more.' With that ahead and within view, how contentedly we can struggle along, and with how little! Progress is what we need to make us happy. Julia was becoming less young each day, and she was still unwed. No suitor had appeared, but while her kinsman remained single she had still looked forward with some confidence in her own skill and good fortune. That good fortune had sent Kenneth abroad when Mary Brown appeared to be getting dangerous, and had given herself the opportunity to slide into intimate correspondence with him as a substitute for his indolent mother. Again kind fortune had intervened in removing the Browns from the scene before Kenneth's return, and in involving them in such disfavour as to remove all danger of their being invited to the house. Then, too, she had aimed her own little shaft to aggravate the alienation by clouding his fair fame with insinuations of a disreputable scandal.