No sooner was his father dead, than Sir Mowbray curtly communicated his instructions to Mrs.Elsmere, then living at the town of Harden for the sake of the great public school recently transported there.

She was to inform him, when the right moment arrived, if it was the boy's wish, to enter the Church, and meanwhile he referred her to his lawyers for particulars of such immediate benefits as were secured to her under the late Baronet's will.
At the moment when Sir Mowbray's letter reached her, Mrs.Elsmere was playing a leading part in the small society to which circumstances had consigned her.

She was the personal friend of half the masters and their wives, and of at least a quarter of the school, while in the little town which stretched up the hill covered by the new school buildings, she was the helper, gossip, and confident of half the parish.

Her vast hats, strange in fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls of many colors, hitched now to this side now to that, her swaying gait and looped-up skirts, her spectacles, and the dangling parcels in which her soul delighted, were the outward signs of a personality familiar to all.
For under those checked shawls which few women passed without an inward marvel, there beat one of the warmest hearts that ever animated mortal clay, and the prematurely, wrinkled face, with its small quick eyes and shrewd indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature as responsive as it was vigorous.
Their owner was constantly in the public eye.

Her house, during the hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, was little else than a halting place between two journeys.