A little child coming suddenly into a circle of strangers knows in which lap it may find a haven, on which bosom it may discover safety and comfort.

If mistress and schoolfellows, servants and shoeblack, dogs and cats, were fond of Charlotte Halliday, their affection had been engendered by her own sweet smiles and loving words, and helping hands always ready to give substantial succour or to aid by active service.
She had been at the Brompton gynaeceum nearly eleven years--only leaving it for her holidays--and now her education was finished, and Mr.Sheldon could find no excuse for leaving her at school any longer, so her departure had been finally agreed upon.
To most damsels of twenty-one this would have been a subject for rejoicing; but it was not so with Charlotte.

She did not like her stepfather; and her mother, though very affectionate and gentle, was a person whose society was apt to become wearisome any time after the first half-hour of social intercourse.

At Hyde Lodge Charlotte had a great deal more of Lingard and condensed and expurgated Gibbon than was quite agreeable; she had to get up at a preternatural hour in the morning and to devote herself to "studies of velocity," whose monotony became wearing as the drip, drip, drip of water on the skull of the tortured criminal.

She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons and accomplishments, the irregular French verbs--the "braires" and "traires" which were so difficult to remember, and which nobody ever could want to use in polite conversation; the ruined castles and dilapidated windmills, the perpetual stumpy pieces of fallen timber and jagged posts, executed with a BBB pencil; the chalky expanse of sky, with that inevitable flight of crows scudding across it:--why must there be always crows scudding across a drawing-master's sky, and why so many jagged posts in a drawing-master's ideal of rural beauty?
Charlotte was inexpressibly weary of all the stereotyped studies; but she liked Hyde Lodge better than the gothic villa.