It was an October twilight, cold and gray, and the place had
a cheerless and dismal aspect to that solitary young traveller, to whom
English life and an English atmosphere were somewhat strange.
She had been seven years abroad, in a school near Paris; rather an
expensive seminary, where the number of pupils was limited, the masters and
mistresses, learned in divers modern accomplishments, numerous, and the
dietary of foreign slops and messes without stint.
Dull and gray as the English sky seemed to her, and dreary as was the
aspect of London in October, this girl was glad to return to her native
land. She had felt herself very lonely in the French school, forgotten and
deserted by her own kindred, a creature to be pitied; and hers was a nature
to which pity was a torture. Other girls had gone home to England for their
holidays; but vacation after vacation went by, and every occasion brought
Clarissa Lovel the same coldly worded letter from her father, telling her
that it was not convenient for him to receive her at home, that he had
heard with pleasure of her progress, and that experienced people with whom
he had conferred, had agreed with him that any interruption to the regular
course of her studies could not fail to be a disadvantage to her in the
future.
"They are all going home except me, papa," she wrote piteously on one
occasion, "and I feel as if I were different from them, somehow.
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