It was not that she talked of the girl so much nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own exasperation at the whole performance.

It was a thin little waif of a story as it came from Mrs.Merrithew, needing to be taken in and comforted before it would yield even to Peter, who as a rich man had come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a rescue.

There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.
After his wife's death, Dave Dassonville had lost his grip on his property as he had on all the means of living.

Later he was visited by a stringency which Mrs.Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence, which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its consequences.

Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that she had taught the village school.
The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the authority of the local doctor, "a trip somewhere"-- "and nobody," said Mrs.Merrithew, "but me to go with her." "Not," she added, "that I'm complainin'.