A Fair Fraud — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

10 A Fair Fraud this, for, of course, she was of their daughter, only their ‘poor relation’; and besides, had. she not a pretty little sitting-room of her very own at the top of the house, opening out of her bedroom, where Eliza, the tender-hearted housemaid, brought her her dinner on a tray— all sorts of nice entyées and sweets as they came out from the dining-room below—and there she had her books and her necdlework, and her cottage piano and her own little writing-table, and a cosy fire if it was cold, so that. she could sit there all by herself the whole evening. What, in the name of fortune, could any girl want more? Well, she might very possibly, in spite of all these creature comforts, have rebelled, as she grew older, against the utter monotony of her pleasureless existence, and have prayed to be sent away as a governess or a shop girl—any- where—to have the chance of making friends of her own age, and of joining in a few simple pleasures and recreations ; and perhaps, in truth, she would have done so but for one thing. And that one thing was Captain Kenneth Drury. From the very first day she ever saw him she worshipped him. He was so big and broad and handsome, a little like his father in manner as well as in appearance, only less pompous and more genial and hearty. When he arrived at Crook- GOMMGIOO