It had some few distinct advantages. It was _very_ healthy, and for these days very cheap. There was a good church, venerable and well cared for; the few, very few residents were all estimable and some interesting. Such as it was, take it all in all, it had seemed a very haven of refuge to Captain Harper and his wife when, some eight or ten years ago, they had pitched their tent there, after the last hopes of recovering any of Mrs Harper's lost money--hopes which for long had every now and then buoyed them up only to prove again delusive--had finally deserted them.
'At anyrate,' the wife, with her irrepressibly sanguine nature, had said, 'we have the comfort of now knowing the worst. And Colin and Bertram are started. _What_ a good thing the boys were the eldest! There is only Fitz to think about, and we'll manage him somehow. For _of course_ the three girls will turn out well. Look at Camilla already.'
Fitz was then about five--the youngest son, the youngest of the family excepting delicate little Margaret. He _was_ 'managed,' and not badly, though a public school was an impossibility; his destination proved to be the navy, and thither at the proper age he made his way in orthodox fashion. The girls, helped by their mother, and by their father too, did their best, and it was far from a bad best. They were naturally intelligent; intensely anxious to seize all opportunities of learning, so that a stray chance of half a dozen lessons in music or French did more for them than as many years will do for most ordinary girls; they were, the two elder ones at least, wonderfully healthy in mind and body, bright-tempered, faithful, unselfish, inheriting from their father the noble characteristics which in some mysterious way had in him so flourished as to oust all the reckless and contemptible qualities of the Bernard Harper who had half-broken his sister's heart, and brought down in sorrow to the grave his gray-haired father.
But alas! they had _not_ known the worst, as the loving, brave-spirited wife and mother had believed. In some sense, it is true, they had not known the _best_, for the years had brought many satisfactions, many unlooked-for, though unimportant, mitigations of the poverty so hard to bear cheerfully--people had been 'very kind.' But the poverty itself had increased. There were literally unavoidable expenses for 'the boys,' if they were not to be stranded in their careers; there was an unexpected rising of the rent owing to their good landlord's sudden death by accident; there was, worst of all, the terrible strain of Captain Harper's ill-health. In itself this was sad enough for the wife and daughters who adored him: it became almost an agony when, joined to the knowledge that more money, and not so very much more, might both relieve his suffering and hold out a reasonable prospect of comparative restoration.