A child, motherless, and with an invalid father, she had been unwelcome; the half-brother, who was so many years her senior, had asserted his authority harshly over and over again. She had been taught something, in odd ways, as representations from outsiders had been made, and she had learned some lessons not intended to be taught her. By nature anything but strong, she was timid and nervous, shrinking from every one, expecting roughness, repressed and taking refuge by her father's paralysed form as the one place where she could hear no reproaches. She dared make no friends, and she did not distinguish between those she might have made, and those she had better not make. No servant stayed long enough to befriend the child, and her earliest recollection was the departure of her nurse, who having, upon one occasion, got certain dainties for her, and being met by John Sandford, had been dismissed on the spot, as a thief. Mrs. Dorriman could yet remember how she had shivered in the cold nursery that night, and how helplessly she had tried to undress herself; and how, when all was quiet, a kind-hearted rough dairymaid had brought her a bowl of milk and a hunch of bread--and how wretched it had all been since then, when it was no one's business to look after her, and how she had been indebted to one or another servant (as they had tried) to do anything for her. Then a rough school, where no one seemed to care about her and where she was in perpetual disgrace for not knowing lessons she could not even read; the discovery of her appalling ignorance and the mortification of having as a child of nine to stand by little ones of five and learn as they did; the scanty provision sent for her clothes, whose very patches she vividly remembered--a harder nature would have soured for life. Mrs. Dorriman grew up with all the spirit crushed out of her, but she was not hardened. She had no holidays; she was left year after year there till she was seventeen. Then a gleam of joy broke into her life, for she was suddenly summoned home--by her father's wish--and she had arrived to find that he had made a rally, and that John Sandford was not there. Her father could barely speak, even inarticulately. She yet could recall his wondering touch upon her shabby gown, and how, almost as in a fairy-tale, she had suddenly found herself in possession of much she had never dreamed of having. His one happiness seemed to be to see her, and to have her near him. A few months passed like this--very few. She had arrived poorly clad, and suffering from the acute cold and bitter wind, in late autumn; when the snowdrops were still blooming, and the earliest trees were yet in bud, he died suddenly; giving her just before his death a little case in which she saw a lovelier fairer likeness of herself--her mother.