Lady Pelham was elder by several years than her sister Lady Harriet. Her father, a saving painstaking attorney, died a few months after she was born. His widow, who, from an idea of their necessity, had concurred in all his economical plans, discovered with equal surprise and delight, that his death had left her the entire management of five-and-forty thousand pounds. This fortune, which she was to enjoy during her life, was secured, in the event of her demise, to little Miss Bridget; and this arrangement was one of the earliest pieces of information which little Miss Bridget received. For seven years the little heiress was, in her mother's undisguised opinion, and consequently in her own, the most important personage upon the face of this terrestrial globe. But worldly glories are fleeting. Lord Winterfield's taste in stewed carp had been improved by half a century's assiduous cultivation. Now the widow Price understood the stewing of carp better than any woman in England, so his Lordship secured to himself the benefit of her talent by making her Lady Winterfield. In ten months after her marriage, another young lady appeared, as much more important than Miss Bridget, as an earl is than an attorney. Fortune, however, dispensed her gifts with tolerable equality. Beauty and rank, indeed, were all on the side of Lady Harriet, but the wealth lay in the scale of Miss Price; for Lord Winterfield, leaving the bulk of his property to the children of his first marriage, bequeathed to his youngest daughter only five thousand pounds. These circumstances procured to Miss Price another advantage, for she married a baronet with a considerable estate, while Lady Harriet's fate stooped to a lieutenant in a marching regiment. After ten years, which Lady Pelham declared were spent in uninterrupted harmony, Sir Edward Pelham died. The exclusive property of his wife's patrimony had been strictly secured to her; and, either thinking such a provision sufficient for a female, or moved by a reason which we shall not at present disclose, Sir Edward bestowed on the nephew who inherited his title, his whole estate, burthened only with a jointure of five hundred pounds a-year, settled upon Lady Pelham by her marriage-contract. Of his daughter, and only child, no mention was made in his testament; but Sir Edward, during the last years of his life, had acquired the character of an oddity, and nobody wondered at his eccentricities. At the commencement of her widowhood, Lady Pelham purchased a villa in ----shire, where she spent the summer, returning in the winter to Grosvenor Street; and this last was almost the only part of her history which was known to Laura. Even before Lady Harriet's marriage, little cordiality had existed between the sisters. From the date of that event, their intercourse had been almost entirely broken off; and the only attention which Laura had ever received from her aunt, was contained in the letter which she was now thankfully contemplating. Her possession of this letter, together with her acquaintance with the facts to which it related, she imagined would form sufficient proof of her identity; and her national ideas of the claims of relationship, awakened a hope of obtaining her aunt's assistance in procuring some respectable situation.