from each extremity of its larger and smaller street--for Westbourne had
only two--outlying cottages of various names dotted the surrounding
fields. The largest of these, and decidedly the handsomest, belonged, as
the door-plate set forth, to Mr Harry Phipps Bunting. It had been called
Bunting Cottage, ever since the late possessor--after having made what
his neighbours esteemed a fortune, by himself keeping the circulating
library, and his spouse the boarding-school--built it by way of
consolation for the second year of his widowhood, and retired there from
business to hold high gentility in his latter days with his only
daughter and heiress, Miss Jenny. At least half of Westbourne believed
that in the said arrangements Mr Bunting had his eye on a second and
somewhat superior match: in short, those good people averred that the
handsome cottage was neither more nor less than a substantial snare for
Mrs Phipps, the widow of a captain and second-cousin of a baronet, who,
with a small annuity and an only son, lived in the odour of great rank
and fashion in a neat brick-house at the other end of the village.

But if Mr Bunting had indeed indulged in speculations on the widow's
heart, they were cut short by a sudden summons to take the journey on
which his early partner had preceded him; and Miss Jenny was left the
undisputed heiress of all his gains and gatherings, now amounting to a
comfortable sum in a London bank, besides the newly-built cottage. None
of the village remembered the time when Miss Jenny was young--not but
that there were older ladies in the community, and few who wore their
years so well--but a matronly staidnees and industry, a solidity of
manner and appearance, had grown so early on the lady, that she had no
youth, and scarcely any childhood, in the recollection of her
neighbours, and she was now on the shady side of thirty.

Miss Jenny might have had suitors, had her encouragement been more