And then one day she went down to Brighton, where the Earl of Aspendell and his only daughter had been living for the last tea years, is a tiny cottage on the Dyke Road, with a little grass-plat before the windows, and dimity curtains fluttering from the open casements--so poor, so friendless, so dignified in their unpretending seclusion. There was very little trouble connected with pecuniary misfortune which Cecil Chudleigh had not known. The extravagance of a father's youth, repented of too late; the wild follies of a brother's mad career--never repented of at all, but cut suddenly short by a fatal false step on a frozen mountain-side, amidst the desolate grandeur of the Alps; a cheerless home; a mother's slow decay, half physical, half mental; and the weary task of beguiling the monotonous days of a ruined and remorseful spendthrift: sorrows such as these had darkened the young life, and hushed the silvery laugh, and transformed the girl of seventeen into a woman drooping under the burden of a woman's heaviest cares. It was only when the Earl of Aspendell and his folly were buried together in a corner of the little hill-side churchyard where Captain Tattersall the loyal, and Phœbe Hessel the daring, sleep so quietly; it was only when Cecil was quite desolate, and sat with the _Times_ newspaper in her lap, staring hopelessly at the advertisements, and wondering whether she was clever enough to be a governess,--it was then only that Marion MacClaverhouse thought fit to trouble herself about the fate of her dead sister's only surviving child. Her brother-in-law's death happened "fortunately," as she said herself, in the Brighton season; and as she had no invitation for the current month, Mrs. MacClaverhouse decided on paying a brief visit to Brighton. The widow was of a prudent turn of mind, and contrived to save money out of her limited income;--for a rainy day, she said. She had been saving odd pounds and shillings and sixpences for this anticipated wet weather ever since her marriage, and as yet Jupiter Pluvius had been pitiful, and had restrained his fury.