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had reason to rate her own good sense at its just value. Life at the Parmores’, on poor pay and a scanty diet, had been a weary business; but it had been worth while. Now she had in her pocket the promise of eighty dollars a month, and the possibility of a more exciting task; for she understood that the St. Georges were very “new,” and the prospect of comparing the manners and customs of the new and the not-new might be amusing. “I wonder,” she thought ironically, “if the Duchess would see the slightest difference”—the Duchess meaning always hers, the puissant lady of Tintagel, where Miss Testvalley had spent so many months shivering with cold, and bandaging the chilblains of the younger girls, while the other daughters, with their particular “finishing” duenna, accompanied their parents from one ducal residence to another. The Duchess of Tintagel, who had beaten Miss Testvalley’s salary well-nigh down to the level of an upper house-maid’s, who had so often paid it after an embarrassingly long delay, who had been surprised that a governess should want a fire in her room, or a hot soup for her school-room dinner—the Duchess was now (all unknown to herself) making up for her arrears toward Miss Testvalley. By giving Mrs. Parmore the chance to say, when she had friends to dine, “I happen to know, for instance, that at Tintagel Castle there are only open fires, and the halls and corridors are not heated at all,” Miss Testvalley had gained several small favours from her parsimonious employer; and by telling her, in the strictest confidence, that Their Graces had at one time felt a good deal of anxiety about their only son—oh, a simple sweet-natured young man if ever there was one; but, then, the temptations which beset a marquess who was heir to a dukedom!—Miss Testvalley had obtained from Mrs. Parmore a letter of recommendation which placed her at the head of the educational sisterhood in the United States.
    Miss Testvalley needed this, and every other form of assistance she could obtain. It would have been difficult for either Mrs. Parmore or the Duchess of Tintagel to imagine how poor she was, or how many people had (or so she thought) a lien on her pitiful savings. It was the penalty of the family glory. Miss Testvalley’s grandfather was the illustrious patriot Gennaro Testavaglia of Modena, fomenter of insurrections, hero of the Risorgimento, author of those once famous historical novels Arnaldo da Brescia and La Donna della Fortezza, but whose fame lingered in England chiefly because he was the cousin of the old Gabriele Rossetti, father of the decried and illustrious Dante Gabriel. The Testavaglias, fleeing from the Austrian inquisition, had come to England at the same time as the Rossettis, and, contracting their impossible name to the scope of English lips, had intermarried with other exiled revolutionaries and anti-Papists, producing sons who were artists and agnostics, and daughters who were evangelicals of the strictest pattern, and governesses in the highest families. Laura Testvalley had obediently followed the family tradition; but she had come after the heroic days of evangelical great ladies who required governesses to match; competition was more active, there was less demand for drawing-room Italian and prayerful considerations on the Collects, and more for German and the natural sciences, in neither of which Miss Testvalley excelled. And in the intervening years the mothers and aunts of the family had grown rheumatic and impotent, the heroic old men lingered on in their robust senility, and the drain on the younger generation grew heavier with every year. By the time she reached her late thirties, Laura had found it impossible, on her English earnings, to keep the grandmother (wife of the Risorgimento hero), and to aid her own infirm mother in supporting an invalid brother and a married sister with six children, whose