she reflected, but home was worse; and as she had no power to provide herself with a third alternative at present, she would abide by the lesser of two evils, and turn it to all the advantage she could. The result of this rational conclusion was that Hester Gould profited to the utmost by the limited quantity and mediocre quality of the education administered at Laburnum Lodge, and acquired at least a foundation on which to build afterwards according to her taste. The discretion evinced by the schoolgirl was a clue to her character. No one was more popular among the small and far from distinguished community; but only the girls whose social position was a little higher than her own could claim Hester as an intimate friend. The gushing nonsense of school friendships had little attraction for her, and she contracted none that she did not contemplate maintaining when the association which had produced them should have ceased. Hester was not brilliantly clever, there was not the least _soupçon_ of genius about her; but she was certainly a superior person in intellect, in manners, and in appearance, to the companions of her studies, the sharers of her school life, in that most unbearable kind of intimacy which means contact without companionship. When she went home for the holidays, things were not much better. She had been fond of her father in a quiet way, though she had taken his intellectual measure pretty accurately, and almost as as soon as she had arrived at the conclusion that their life was on a dull mean scale, had recognised his inability to elevate or enliven it. "We should grub on like this all our lives, if it depended on _him_," the girl had said to herself in emphatic, if not elegant soliloquy; and there had been no wilful disrespect to the honest, humdrum, unobservant father in the remark, only Hester's unclouded perception and resolute custom of telling herself the truth. When she was a little over fifteen years old her father died, and she had to endure, in addition to her natural grief, which was unfeigned and sore, a declension in position, and a narrowing of the narrow income, which at its best she had regarded with impatience, very keen though never expressed, or permitted to escape her by so much as a gesture. Her aunt moved into a smaller house in an inferior situation, discharged one of the two female servants who had composed their modest establishment, and told Hester she hoped she had profited sufficiently by her music and singing lessons to go on without a master, for she could no longer afford to continue them.