So for the three years she had lived at home with her grandmother she comported herself with strict exclusiveness. No young man out of the formidable list of possible suitors she had allowed to a young girl with her means had approached her to tell a tale of love, and towards all whom she met she sought to pass for a retiring shadow. But her first advent into the world had brought an alarming, a horrible awakening. The discipline of denial to which she had inured herself prepared her for the loss of her modest competency. Up to the time of leaving school, she had regarded her income as sure as the coming of the planets into the constellations. Soon after leaving Miss Graham's doubts began to arise in her mind. When at length the blow came, and she learned she was penniless, no giant despair crushed her. She simply bowed to the inevitable, without going to the trouble of even affecting indifference. The money or income had been hers, and was gone. To lose an income was an unmixed evil, but it ought to affect her less than others, for had she not cultivated self-abnegation? Was she not used to desire little or nothing, and was not the step between asking for little next to that of working for the necessaries of life, for the things indispensable? She should now have to go forth and earn her bread, for she could not think of encroaching on the little left to her grandmother. She was young, and healthy, and accomplished, as far as Miss Graham's select seminary for young ladies at Streatham could make a receptive pupil accomplished. Up to this she had allowed herself only one luxury, a deep, and quiet, and romantic love, the love for her kind-hearted old grandmother. That need not even now be put away, could not, indeed, be put away, but it might and must be dissimulated. Or, anyway, it might and must remain undemonstrative, for to show much affection to her grandmother would be to enhance the pain of the old woman at the parting. Hence she steeled herself, and prepared for the separation with seeming indifference, which only made the desolation seem to Mrs. Grace more complete, more like death, and freed it from the torture of struggling with a living and cruel force.