It would be hard to find solace in Banbrigg.
Hither her parents had come to live when she was thirteen years old, her home having previously been in another and a larger manufacturing town.
Her father was a man marked for ill-fortune: it pursued him from his entrance into the world, and would inevitably--you read it in his face--hunt him into a sad grave.

He was the youngest of a large family; his very birth had been an added misery to a household struggling with want.

His education was of the slightest; at twelve years of age he was already supporting himself, or, one would say, keeping himself above the point of starvation; and at three-and-twenty--the age when Wilfrid Athel is entering upon life in the joy of freedom--was ludicrously bankrupt, a petty business he had established being sold up for a debt something short of as many pounds as he had years.

He drifted into indefinite mercantile clerkships, an existence possibly preferable to that of the fourth circle of Inferno, and then seemed at length to have fallen upon a piece of good luck, such as, according to a maxim of pathetic optimism wherewith he was wont to cheer himself, must come to every man sooner or later--provided he do not die of hunger whilst it is on the way.

He married a schoolmistress, one Miss Martin, who was responsible for the teaching of some twelve or fifteen children of tender age, and who, what was more, owned the house in which she kept school.