Mrs. Green had been the daughter of a confidential clerk to her husband. She had lost her mother early in life, and her father died when she was but eighteen years of age. His salary in the house of Messrs. Green and Schnackwether had been, for a long period prior to his death, very liberal, and he might, with reasonable economy, have saved a few hundreds of pounds out of it if he had been so inclined. He ought, certainly, to have left some provision behind him in the shape of a life assurance, but he did not. He lived entirely up to, or somewhat beyond, his means. Miss Thomson, his daughter, was consequently obliged to earn her subsequent livelihood, which she did as a daily governess. Her experience in this vocation was not, I dare say, much unlike the experience of other young women in that position, of which the reader will have a tolerably accurate notion, and therefore I will abstain from describing it. It may be enough to say, that it was a cheerless, hard, and mortifying experience. She confessed that rebuffs and petty insults shut up, and the wearing influence of consecutive labour dried up, the wells of female emotion, gave a certain piquancy or sharpness to her thoughts, rendered her, indeed, distrustful of the world, and cynical, if not calculating and selfish. During her girlhood, while her father lived, and after his death, but before her marriage, Mrs. Green had received many kindnesses from her late parent's master. He was attached to his clerk Thomson by that sort of attachment, and to that extent, which long and faithful service begets in the mind of an employer. To do the father of Mrs. Green simple justice, it must be stated that he had never robbed; peculated, or been in the slightest degree unfaithful to the house he served, or its members. Just before he died, the clerk received a promise from his master, Mr. Green, that little Helen should want for nothing as long as she lived, which promise was kept during her subsequent spinstership by inquiries, every quarter, with methodical exactness, how she was getting on, and what she wanted; answers to which questions were frankly given by her on all occasions, and betrayed to the merchant some requirement on her part every three months. It would now be a dress or a bonnet; it would on another occasion be the means of paying a quarter's rent of her apartments; it would again be something else. The article itself, or a cheque for its purchase or satisfaction, was uniformly forthcoming. In this way a communication had been always maintained from the day of Thomson's death to the day of Miss Thomson's marriage between the young woman and her subsequent husband.