Such was Aunt Mary.  The true student of human nature should not find it surprising that she spoiled Honora and strove—­at what secret expense, care, and self-denial to Uncle Tom and herself, none will ever know—­to adorn the child that she might appear creditably among companions whose parents were more fortunate in this world’s goods; that she denied herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated.  Nor is it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly complex organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine, who was shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.

Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by one the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and winter.  The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the servants who had been left behind chattered on the front steps.  Honora could not bear the sound of the trains that drifted across the night, and the sight of the trunks piled in the Hanburys’ hall, in Wayland Square, always filled her with a sickening longing.  Would the day ever come when she, too, would depart for the bright places of the earth?  Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was filled with a fierce belief in a destiny to sit in the high seats, to receive homage and dispense bounties, to discourse with great intellects, to know London and Paris and the marts and centres of the world as her father had.  To escape—­only to escape from the prison walls of a humdrum existence, and to soar!

Let us, if we can, reconstruct an August day when all (or nearly all) of Honora’s small friends were gone eastward to the mountains or the seaside.  In “the little house under the hill,” the surface of which was a hot slate roof, Honora would awake about seven o’clock to find old Catherine bending over her in a dun-coloured calico dress, with the light fiercely beating against the closed shutters that braved it so unflinchingly throughout the day.

“The birds are before ye, Miss Honora, honey, and your uncle waterin’ his roses this half-hour.”

Uncle Tom was indeed an early riser.  As Honora dressed (Catherine assisting as at a ceremony), she could see him, in his seersucker coat, bending tenderly over his beds; he lived enveloped in a peace which has since struck wonder to Honora’s soul.  She lingered in her dressing, even in those days, falling into reveries from which Catherine gently and deferentially aroused her; and Uncle Tom would be carving the beefsteak and Aunt Mary pouring the coffee when she finally arrived in the dining room to nibble at one of Bridget’s unforgettable rolls or hot biscuits.  Uncle Tom had his joke, and at quarter-past eight precisely he would kiss Aunt Mary and walk to the corner to wait for the ambling horse-car that was to take him to the bank.  Sometimes Honora went to the corner with him, and he waved her good-by from the platform as he felt in his pocket for the nickel that was to pay his fare.