us, and I am only thankful that Providence has so prospered me that I can be of use of the young people.  I have arranged that my nephew, John Forrester, is to come and do for me what I cannot so well manage without help; and as I have no idea of falling behind the high farming of the times, I have given him a thorough course of the agricultural chemistry, so much in fashion, before he tries the practical branch of the science.  I hope he will not be too new-fangled and upsetting altogether with his theories; but he is a good lad in the main, and I think he will do.  Besides John, I have to help his brother James to begin business, and I have two nieces whose education I am making more thorough than their parents could afford to do.”

“So you have no room for me,” said Jane.  “I should have known it.  I have no claim on any one, not a relation in the world but a sister, less fit to cope with it than myself, and a cousin, newly found under sad circumstances, and tied down not to assist us.  But could you not give us any encouragement, for that is what I want most?  Your own experience——­”

“My own experience is very different from what yours can be.  My father died in the early years of a long lease of twenty-one years, when he had laid out several thousands, all the capital he had, and all he could raise, upon the land, hoping to get it out again with interest and a large profit, for the farm was a fine one, though it had been badly managed before.  He had no son to take up the lease; and had things been wound up, and the lease sold, there would have been a heavy loss.  I believed that I could manage the concern, and got leave from the landlord, rather as a favour, to continue on Allendale.  I was industrious and methodical, and reduced the expenses of management below what they had been in my father’s time, and consequently made more money than even he could have made of it.  My landlord willingly took me again for a tenant when the lease was expired, particularly as I offered as much as any one for it.  The value of the lease, stock, and crop, that I began business with, could not have been less for me to keep than 5,000 pounds, though if they had been sold they might have brought only half that amount.  You see I had a good start.  I like the work, and it likes me.  I am a richer, a happier, and a more useful woman, than I could have been if I had had 20,000 pounds all left me in a lump.”

“This is very different, indeed, from our case,” said Jane.  “It is the want of capital that I feel so very hard.  I could make something of capital.”

“I suppose that for you, Miss Melville, with nothing but youth, health, and a stout heart, there is nothing but a governess’s situation to be thought of.  Society seems to say to gentlewomen who have not enough to live on, ‘Teach or marry;’ and the governess market and the marriage market are both sadly overstocked.  People have not all got a taste for either alternative.  Here am I, a sensible, well-disposed woman, but yet I never could teach in my life, and I never had any wish to marry.”