“There is not much to tell. When my little fortune—left by my uncle, the drysalter—fell in to me I was a lonely old woman, without one surviving relative for whom I cared twopence. I was pretty tired of teaching French and German—God knows how many hundred times I must have gone through Ollendorff in both languages—and I’ve done him a good many times in Italian, _par dessus le marché_. Perhaps I might have held on for a year or two longer, as I was very fond of those nice girls and boys at Kettisford Vicarage, if it hadn’t been for Ollendorff. _He_ decided me. Leila, the youngest girl, had only just begun that accursed book. She was blundering over ‘the baker’s golden candlestick’ the very morning I got the lawyer’s letter to tell me of my uncle’s death, and the will, and the legacy. I snatched the book out of her hand, and shut it with a bang. ‘Ain’t I to do any more Ollendorff, Sally?’ she asked. ‘You may do as much as you like, my love,’ I said, ‘but you’ll do no more with me. I’m a millionaire, or at least I feel as rich and independent as if I were a Rothschild.’ Well, I lay awake all that night making plans for my life, and trying to think out how I could get the most comfort out of my little fortune, enjoy my declining years, have everything I wanted, and yet be of some use to my fellow-creatures; and the end of it was that I made up my mind to take a roomy lodging in a poor neighbourhood, where I should not be tempted to spend a penny upon appearances, furnish it after my own heart, and make myself happy in just my own way, without caring a straw what anybody thought about me. I knew that I was plain as well as elderly, that I could never be admired, or cut a figure in the genteel world, so I determined to renounce the gentilities altogether and to be looked up to in a little world of my own.” “And you have found your plan answer——”