And she owned two large houses in the High Street, and a great warehouse at St.Thomas's, and had been bought out of land by the Railway at St.David's,--much to her own dissatisfaction, as she was wont to express herself, but, undoubtedly, at a very high price.

It will be understood therefore, that Miss Stanbury was wealthy, and that she was bound to the city in which she lived by peculiar ties.
But Miss Stanbury had not been born to this wealth, nor can she be said to have inherited from her forefathers any of these high privileges which had been awarded to her.

She had achieved them by the romance of her life and the manner in which she had carried herself amidst its vicissitudes.

Her father had been vicar of Nuncombe Putney, a parish lying twenty miles west of Exeter, among the moors.

And on her father's death, her brother, also now dead, had become vicar of the same parish,--her brother, whose only son, Hugh Stanbury, we already know, working for the "D.