There were little deprivations in what comforts and luxuries of soft pillows, hot water, apples, nuts, prunes, were going at St. Bevis’s—a piece of petty malice which might cause Lady Bell’s young bones, blood, and appetite to crave and cry out, and her sense of fairness and honour to smart, but which did not press hardly on a healthy girl already trained to some measure of self-denial, as such girls were commonly trained. What was worse, there was the sedulous, suspicious guarding of Lady Bell from ever coming near Mrs. Die in any moment of weakness or kindred kindness on Mrs. Die’s part. Mrs. Kitty took care that there should not be the most distant danger of Lady Bell’s stepping between them, and ousting Mrs. Kitty from the place which she prized so highly, that she fancied the whole world must prize it too, as the recipient of Mrs. Die’s unhappy secrets. But Lady Bell did not covet the post which was thus denied her. This was the trifling amount of vengeance—even more trifling in sound than in reality—which, so far as it appeared, was all Mrs. Kitty chose to inflict on Lady Bell for coming to St. Bevis’s at all, and after coming for taking it upon her to give orders to Mrs. Kitty as if she were a common servant—the servant of a minx like Lady Bell, poorer than Mrs. Kitty herself, and doomed to hang as another burden on the Godwins, making up the dead weight under which the house was tottering to its fall. Mr. Sneyd and Mr. Greenwood, the remaining authorities, with the exception of the bailiffs who were billeted at St. Bevis’s every month or two, were good-natured scamps and vagabonds each according to his cloth, who not uncharacteristically experienced a lingering sentiment of shame, pity, and tenderness, of which their master was destitute, where the young girl, Lady Bell, was concerned. The butler and the chaplain did not resent, like Mrs. Kitty, Lady Bell’s obstinately refusing to consent to any freedom of speech and bearing on their part. They even applauded her for it, crying. Curse them, Lady Bell was game. She was a proud, delicate-minded young lady, who deserved another fate, which they would have procured for her, if it had been in their power, and had not cost them too much. They did what they could. Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Sneyd conformed themselves, where Lady Bell was in question, to her notion of propriety, and flattered and won her to some friendly feeling towards them in their debasement, by the respect which they showed her and the trouble which they took to be of use to her. Mr. Greenwood offered Lady Bell humbly his valuable assistance in the practice of penmanship and the study of French fables, to which she set herself in accordance with a promise to her dead friend, with a sort of dull childish fidelity to the letter, and with a hopeless doggedness of spirit.