She had been Mr.Grey's only child, and her mother had been dead for fifteen or sixteen years.

She was now about thirty years of age, but was generally regarded as ranging somewhere between forty and fifty.

"If she isn't nearer fifty than forty I'll eat my old shoes," said a lady in the neighborhood to a gentleman.

"I've known her these twenty years, and she's not altered in the least." As Dolly Grey had been only ten twenty years ago, the lady must have been wrong.

But it is singular how a person's memory of things may be created out of their present appearances.