From one friend alone did she derive assistance in the practical details of her task. This friend was Mr. Thomas Meres, of whom we have already heard as Rhoda’s father. His acquaintance she had made in the earliest days of her married life; he acted as secretary to Mr. Clarendon. Thomas Meres was then a man of thirty; he had attempted literature, and failed to get a living by it, and had gladly accepted a position which for a time brought means of support for himself and others dependent upon him. These others--Isabel only discovered it after Mr. Clarendon’s death--were a wife and two children. One day, when Isabel had been six months a widow, she received from the late secretary a letter of appeal for aid in desperate circumstances; a letter which she answered by at once summoning to Knightswell the writer and his two children, girls of four and six respectively. She had always regarded Mr. Meres with favour; without information as to his private life, she felt that some hidden misery weighed upon him, and that he was a man of much capability and goodness sadly at odds with fortune. At Knightswell she won his confidence, and heard from him a dismal tale of domestic wretchedness. Happily, the main cause of his sufferings had at length abandoned the home she had made no home, and the only present difficulty was to find a means of livelihood. The man himself was starving; the children were sad-looking little creatures, victims of cruelty and a hard lot. The three remained at Knightswell for several weeks, being of course on the footing of visitors, and receiving kindness which put poor Tom Meres into spiritual bondage for life, bondage he would not have cast off for any luxurious freedom the world could offer him. Eventually a position was found for him, and he returned with his children to London. Having made Ada’s acquaintance in those early days of her rescue from savagery, Meres continued to regard her with living interest, often prophesying to her guardian that she would grow into a remarkable woman. At least once a year he was at Knightswell, and he followed the course of the child’s education with attentive scrutiny. Ada came to like him; she displayed no childlike fondness for him, any more than for any one else, but she listened with pleasure to his talk, and in turn spoke to him of things of which to all others she kept silence. If Tom did not positively encourage her critical propensities, he was at all events at no pains to check them, and it was from his library that she received books which set her on the track of modern literature, which otherwise she would have discovered much later. Isabel, when her troubles of conscience began, taxed her friend with this.