THE St. Johns had one relative, and only one, so far as they knew. This was Miss Jane Maydew, who lived in London, the aunt of their mother, a lady who possessed in her own right--but, alas, only in the form of an annuity--the magnificent income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year. To think that this old lady, with only herself to think of, should have fifty pounds more yearly than a clergyman with a family, and all the parish looking to him! More than once this idea had crossed even Hester's mind, though she was very reasonable and could make her pounds go further than most people. Miss Maydew was not very much older than her niece, but yet she was an old lady, sixty-five, or thereabouts. She liked her little comforts as well as most people, yet she had laid by fifty pounds of her income for the last twenty years, with the utmost regularity. A thousand pounds is a pretty little sum of money, but it does not seem much to account for twenty years of savings. A stockbroker might make it easily in a morning by a mere transfer from one hand to another; and to think how much wear and tear of humanity can be in it on the other hand! It is discouraging to poor economists to feel how little they can do, labour as they may; but I don't think Miss Maydew had anything of this feeling. She was on the contrary very proud of her thousand pounds. It was her own creation, she had made it out of nothing; and the name of it, a thousand pounds! was as a strain of music in her ears, like the name of a favourite child. Perhaps it was the completion of this beautiful sum, rounded and finished like a poem, which gave her something of that satisfaction and wish for repose which follows the completion of every great work; and this brought about her visit to Brentburn, and all that directly and indirectly followed it. She had not seen the St. Johns since Hester's death, though they were her nearest relatives, the natural heirs of the fortune she had accumulated. And the summer was warming into June, and everything spoke of the country. Miss Maydew lived in Great Coram Street, Russell Square. She had two charming large rooms, her bedroom at the back, her sitting-room at the front, the two drawing-rooms in better days of the comfortable Bloomsbury mansion. But even when your rooms are airy and cool, it is hard to fight against that sense of summer which drops into a London street in the warm long days, waking recollections of all kinds, making eyelids drowsy, and the imagination work. Even the cries in the street, the "flowers a blowing and a growing" of the costermongers, the first vegetables, the "groundsel for your birds," and the very sight of the greengrocer opposite with his groves of young cabbages and baskets of young potatoes awoke this sensation of summer in the heart of the solitary woman at her window. Her youth, which was so full of summer, stirred in her once more, and old scenes all framed in