She has reason to be fond of me.

Tell her I sent you to her, and that she must take you in for ten shillings a week.
Emily wept for gratitude, and ever afterward enthroned old Mrs.Maytham on an altar as a princely and sainted benefactor, though after she had invested her legacy she got only twenty pounds a year from it.
"It was so _kind_ of her," she used to say with heartfelt humbleness of spirit.

"I never _dreamed_ of her doing such a generous thing.

I hadn't a _shadow_ of a claim upon her--not a _shadow_." It was her way to express her honest emotions with emphasis which italicised, as it were, her outpourings of pleasure or appreciation.
She returned to London and presented herself to the ex-serving-woman.
Mrs.Cupp had indeed reason to remember her mistress gratefully.

At a time when youth and indiscreet affection had betrayed her disastrously, she had been saved from open disgrace and taken care of by Mrs.Maytham.
The old lady, who had then been a vigorous, sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman, had made the soldier lover marry his despairing sweetheart, and when he had promptly drunk himself to death, she had set her up in a lodging-house which had thriven and enabled her to support herself and her daughter decently.
In the second story of her respectable, dingy house there was a small room which she went to some trouble to furnish up for her dead mistress's friend.