OR, SELF-DEPENDENCE. BY MRS. GORDON SMYTHIES, AUTHOR OF "COUSIN GEOFFREY," "MARRIED FOR LOVE," &c. "We need not bid for cloistered cell, THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, SUCCESSORS TO HENRY COLBURN, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.. 1861. The right of Translation is reserved. THE DAILY GOVERNESS. CHAPTER I. LADY-DAY. It was a morning in March, very wet, very windy, very cold, and therefore very miserable. Lady-day by the calendar, but not a day for ladies by any means. It was eight o'clock by the chime of St. Clement Danes, and that assertion was confirmed by the echoes of many distant bells. Neither the day nor the hour was such as to tempt any great display of kid boots, with military heels, and scarlet petticoats, peeping from under voluminously flounced skirts. VOL. I. B But . . No man was out who could find any excuse for remaining at home. Houseless wanderers of course were abroad: they always are, rain or shine; and henpecked husbands, who preferred the storm without to that within, and the east wind to the domestic breeze. Men of business of all ranks filled the omnibuses and cabs, bent, in spite of the hurricane, on still raising the wind! there was scarcely a woman, still less a lady, to be seen, when a young girl issued from a dingy house in Arundel Street, Strand, armed with a Mrs. Gamp-like umbrella, which, so far from sheltering her from the pitiless storm, seemed very likely to increase her discomfort, and add to the miseries of a walk which few men would have liked to undertake on such a morning. This umbrella had, however, been forced on Miss Lucy Blair, "the Daily Governess," by Mrs. Bragge, the kind landlady in whose house her mother and herself occupied a second floor. Mrs. Bragge, though a London lodging-house keeper, had a conscience and a heart, a conscience, rare, indeed, in her line of life, for it made her respect tea-caddies and cold meat; and a heart rarer still in such a line of life, the heart that could feel for another, even when that other was only a Second Floor. Lucy felt that the old umbrella would be an incumbrance, but she did not like to refuse what was so very kindly offered. Then the keen wind, rushing under the dingy canopy formed by this old umbrella, carried it along like a ship in full sail, and as, among other defects, it had no knob or hook, and the stick from constant wear was smooth as glass, it was with the greatest difficulty Lucy's little numbed fingers could retain any hold of it; to keep up with it at all, she had to run along the wet and muddy streets, almost flooded by the rain, her teeth chattering with the cold, her little feet ill-shod, soaked, and muddy, and her bonnet blown awry. To add |