As if fortune had had no other object in view but the trial of Nancy’s character by adversity, she had no sooner handed over Letizia to the care of the Sisters than she secured an engagement with a bloodthirsty melodrama called _The Lights of Paris_, in which she toured what were called the “number two” towns for many, many weeks. Her part was very different from the one Mr. Plimmer had offered her. Instead of the unhappy young mother reconciled in the last act to a forgiving husband she was to be a dark-eyed adventuress, all ostrich plumes and swishing silk petticoats, whose diabolical support of the villain earned groans and hisses from every audience and whose death at last in the very sewer where she had plotted to drown the heroine was greeted with acclamation. However, what did the part matter? She was earning four pounds a week, out of which she was managing to save half. And what did these dreary manufacturing towns matter? There was less temptation to spend money in them. Or the dull company of second-rate actors and actresses? There was small encouragement to waste her money in buying clothes to impress them. Blackburn, Bury, Bolton, St. Helens, Oldham, Rochdale, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hartlepool, Gateshead, Sunderland, South Shields. Rain and smoke and blight and the stench of chemicals. The clatter of clogs every morning and every afternoon when the women were going to and from their work in the factories. Soot and puddles. Murky canals slimed always with a foul iridescence. Sodden shawls and wet slates. Infinite ugliness, dawns and days and dusks cinereous, eternal in festivity, and ceaseless monotone. No vivid colour anywhere except occasionally in the gutters a piece of orange-peel and on the sweating walls the posters of the tawdry melodrama in which she was playing. It was good to think of Letizia far from these drizzling and fumid airs. In November the _Lights of Paris_ company visited Brigham where for several years now a theatre had stood actually on the site of the original tabernacle of the Peculiar Children of God. On making inquiries about the present state of Lebanon House, Nancy heard that old Mrs. Fuller had died about five months earlier. When Letizia went to school at the convent, Nancy had written and told the old lady; but she had never received an answer to her letter. She did not feel at all inclined to visit Caleb or the aunts, and although she found out where Emily Young was living she did not succeed in meeting her, Miss Young being away that week. Nancy was wondering if her news about Letizia had pleased the old lady, when the following week at Birkenhead she had a letter from Miss Young. 22 Rosebank Terrace, Brigham. November 20th, ’95. Dear Mrs. Fuller,