IN a snowy villa, with a sloping lawn, just outside the great commercial seaport, Barkington, there lived a few years ago a happy family. A lady, middle-aged, but still charming; two young friends of hers; and a periodical visitor. The lady was Mrs. Dodd; her occasional visitor was her husband; her friends were her son Edward, aged twenty, and her daughter Julia, nineteen, the fruit of a misalliance.

NEARLY a quarter of a century ago, Lucy Fountain, a young lady of beauty and distinction, was, by the death of her mother, her sole surviving parent, left in the hands of her two trustees, Edward Fountain, Esq., of Font Abbey, and Mr. Bazalgette, a merchant whose wife was Mrs. Fountain's half-sister. They agreed to lighten the burden by dividing it. She should spend half the year with each trustee in turn, until marriage should take her off their hands. Our mild tale begins in Mr. Bazalgette's own house, two years after the date of that arrangement. The chit-chat must be your main clue to the...

The second part of this ever-appealing romance of the European Middle Ages, complete with travel ( those inns ... and even more, those women... ), as fresh now as in those past centuries. At once sensitive and bawdy, steeped in the atmosphere of its time, this. Is a tale for all ages