Yet still whenever he did happen to remain with them a day, or an evening, he was good and affectionate, and always entertained them with descriptions of all he would do as soon as he got into practice.
Meantime they kept house as economically as possible upon the little ready money they had, hoping that more would come in--that Hilary would get pupils.
But Hilary never did.

To any body who knows London this will not be surprising .-- The wonder was in the Misses Leaf being so simple as to imagine that a young country lady, settling herself in lodgings in an obscure metropolitan street, without friends or introduction, could ever expect such a thing.

No thing but her own daring, and the irrepressible well-spring of hope that was in her healthy youth, could have sustained her in what, ten years after, would have appeared to her, as it certainty was, downright insanity.

But Heaven takes care of the mad, the righteously and unselfishly mad, and Heaven took care of poor Hilary.
The hundred labors she went through--weariness of body and travail of soul, the risks she ran, the pitfalls she escaped--what need to record here?
Many have recorded the like, many more have known them, and acknowledged that when such histories are reproduced in books how utterly imagination fades before reality.

Hilary never looked back-upon that time herself without a shuddering wonder how she could have dared all and gone through all.