THE QUIET MISS GODOLPHIN and A CHANCE CHILD

An excerpt from the beginning of the first story:

The Quiet Miss Godolphin.

THE Cedars had all the somber and sleepy respectability of a second-rate old country house. It stood back from a long quiet road connecting the two Kentish villages of Orpingden and St. Martha's Cray, and there was nothing about it to win a second look from the passer-by. The square, brown brick house, with two windows at each side of the door, and six in the story above, a smooth lawn in front, shaded by the trees from which the place was named, and two narrow flower-beds close to the house, was the residence of Mr. Thomas Godolphin, ex-banker.

Mrs. Godolphin had been dead for many years, and the household had been superintended by an ancient cousin Godolphin, who was laudably anxious to do her duty to her relations, and, in default of a single original idea of her own, adhered with trembling tenacity to custom and standard. Her labors resulted in making the Cedars a capital family hotel, without any of the idiosyncrasies of a home. Nor did the reins of household government fall from her hands until she had trained her successors to her way of guiding them.

There were three Godolphin girls, and no boy. When the eldest was sixteen and the youngest twelve, they were all sent to finish their education with a limited number of young ladies under the care of a rector's widow in Clifton.

It was four years before they returned to the Cedars. Plain girls they had always been, and they grew into plainer young women. They were very much alike—Maria, Sophia, and Caroline. Sophia was the shortest, and Caroline the tallest, and at first this was the only distinction that most people could draw between them. Had any close student of human nature paid a few morning visits he might have observed that Sophia talked the most, and that Maria always rang the bell for the servant and had the key-basket near at hand. As it was, the old ladies of Orpingden and the Cray labeled them "three sensible, ladylike young women."
But there was one who saw a wonderful difference—one who had known and served them from their cradles, yet who felt nothing but a civil hireling interest in Miss Maria and Miss Sophia, and yearned with almost motherly affection over the youngest, Caroline.

Nurse Bryant was the widow of a small grocer of St. Martha's Cray, and had taken her situation within six months after her husband's death, changing her humble weeds for the lilac badge of servitude at the Cedars, at Mrs. Godolphin's suggestion that " mourning might have a depressing influence in the nursery."

She was a tall, large-framed woman, of Yorkshire extraction, and during the years of her brief married life had become very popular in the neighborhood, as a Christian housewife of bountiful and hearty humanity is apt to be. There was a good deal of pity felt for her when she was found to be so " ill left" as to be willing to take service at the Cedars. "I told her," said the landlady of the Wheatsheaf Inn, chatting in her parlor, " that after life in her own house, where there was always plenty o' move, what with the young men in the business and the kind, neighborly ways of herself and the good man that's gone, it 'd be a terrible trial to go to that dead-and-alive place, where you mustn't speak to nobody till they've produced the highest references to their good character ever since they were born. But she's kind o' stunned like just now, poor thing; and says she, ' When the song's gone out o' your life, Mrs. Barnes, you can't start another while it's a-ringin' in your ears. It's best to have a bit of a silence, and out o' that, maybe, a psalm'll come by-and-by!'"
Very faithfully did Nurse Bryant fulfill her duties, but it was not till the last days of Mrs. Godolphin's life, when she was walking in a shadow which she confided to none but this homely, sympathetic woman, who could check and cheer away the causeless tears without scorning them, that the two learned fully to understand each other. So that when the cry of a new-born babe mingled with the moan of its dying mother, lingering at the edge of life to whisper, " I can trust you, Bryant; you will be good to her," Nurse Bryant answered heartily, " Please God, I will—as if she was my own."

Existence can never be reduced to so perfect a system as to allow of no kindly deviation for those who seek it. Miss Godolphin might punctuate her nieces' lives into school-hours and play-hours, and walking-time, but she could not regulate away all wet Sundays, and hours between the lights, and stray afternoons when Maria and Sophia went to exchange visits with the other well-bred little girls of Orpingden and St. Martha's Cray. And at all such odd seasons some mysterious attraction drew little Caroline to Nurse Bryant's knee.
The " mamma" of whose manners and opinions Miss Godolphin spoke preceptively, was not the "mamma" ...