Coralie

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Eighty pounds a year! My reader can imagine that this was no great fortune. I had little or nothing to spend in kid gloves or cigars; indeed to speak plain prosaic English I went without a good dinner far oftener than I had one. Yet withal I was passing rich on eighty pounds a year. My father Captain Trevelyan a brave and deserving officer died when I was a child. My mother a meek fragile invalid never recovered his loss but died some years after him leaving me alone in the world with my sister Clare. When I was young I had great dreams of fame and glory. I was to be a brave soldier like my dear dead father or a great writer or a statesman. I dreamed of everything except falling into the common grooves of life - which was my fate in after years. My mother believing in my dreams contrived to send me to college - we both considered a college education the only preliminary to a golden future. How she managed it out of her slender means I cannot tell but she kept me at college for three years. I was just trying to decide what profession to adopt when a letter came summoning me suddenly home.