Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the victim of a fate sordid and common enough, yet not without its elements of dark poetry.

Some fifteen months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away.

She had been then strong and well favored, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch.

At the bottom of all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame.
Neither were to be found in sufficient measure within her home.

Her father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other, up to a certain point, the natural instincts of kinship.