great dinner-giver in his bachelor days, and knew every restaurant in London. "They don't forget me here, you see," he said, when the sleek Italian waiter brought him extra knives and forks for the dual portion which was to serve for three. Such had been the utmost limit of Jessie's pleasures before she answered an advertisement in the _Times_, which stated that a lady, living in a retired part of Cornwall, required the services of a young lady who could write a good hand, keep accounts, and had some knowledge of housekeeping--who was willing, active, cheerful, and good-tempered. Salary, thirty pounds per annum. It was not the first advertisement by many that Jessie had answered. Indeed, she seemed, to her own mind, to have been doing nothing but answering advertisements, and hoping against hope for a favourable reply, since her eighteenth birthday, when it had been borne in upon her, as the Evangelicals say, that she ought to go out into the world, and do something for her living, making one mouth less to be filled from the family bread-pan. "There's no use talking, mother," she said, when Mrs. Bridgeman tried to prove that the bright useful eldest daughter cost nothing; "I eat, and food costs money. I have a dreadfully healthy appetite, and if I could get a decent situation I should cost you nothing, and should be able to send you half my salary. And now that Milly is getting a big girl----" "She hasn't an idea of making herself useful," sighed the mother; "only yesterday she let the milkman ring three times and then march away without leaving us a drop of milk, because she was too proud or too lazy to open the door, while Sarah and I were up to our eyes in the wash." "Perhaps she didn't hear him," suggested Jessie, charitably. "She must have heard his pails if she didn't hear _him_," said Mrs. Bridgeman; "besides he 'yooped,' for I heard him, and relied upon that idle child for taking in the milk. But put not your trust in princes," concluded the overworked matron, rather vaguely. "Salary, thirty pounds per annum," repeated Jessie, reading the Cornish lady's advertisement over and over again, as if it had been a charm; "why that would be a perfect fortune; think what you could do with an extra fifteen pounds a year!" "My dear, it would make my life heaven. But you would want all the money for your dress: you would have to be always nice. There would be dinner parties, no doubt, and you would be asked to come into the drawing-room of an evening," said Mrs. Bridgeman, whose ideas of the governess's social status were derived solely from "Jane Eyre."