In her own country and amongst her own people, Dolly had been no prophet. Rather she had been regarded as a nonentity, and the little world of Dassell wondered at Mr. Mortomley's choice. Amongst strangers Dolly had spread her wings and tried her strength. She felt in the position of a usually silent man, considered by his friends rather stupid than otherwise, who in a fresh place and under unwonted circumstances opens his mouth and gives utterance to words he knew not previously were his to command. Yes, Dolly would never be humble again. She had lost that attraction, and through all the years to follow, the years filled with happiness and sorrow, exaltation and abasement, she never recovered it. There are plants of a rare sweetness which die more surely from excess of sunshine than from the severity of frost; common plants, yet that we miss from the borders set round and about our homes with a heart-ache we never feel when a more flaunting flower fails to make its appearance; and just such a tender blossom, just such a healing herb, died that summer in the garden of Dolly's nature. And she only nineteen! Well-a-day, the plant had not perhaps had time to strike its roots very deep, and the soil was certainly uncongenial. At all events its place knew it no more, and something of sweetness and softness departed with it. But it was only a very keen and close observer who could have detected all this; for other flowers sprang up and made a great show where that had been--graces of manner, inflections of voice, thoughtfulness for others, which if acquired seemed none the less charming on that account, a desire to please and be pleased, which exercised itself on rich and poor alike--these things and the sunshine of old which she still carried with her, made Dolly seem a very exceptional woman in the bright years which were still to come. They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home, altered her will which had provided for the establishment and preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of Homewood. If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest, accelerated the descent.