Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the step-father whom
she so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink? Relations who might
interfere and pray and meddle and spoil things?

However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be
concealed. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan she
sometimes pretended to herself to be. She had aunts--an accident that
may happen to the best of us.

A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth
left Harrow and went to Ealing where he was received in a family in
the capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his
daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who
knew exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had
taught her to know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly of
youth--not her own youth--taught her how to get it. There were several
pups. She selected the most eligible, secretly married him, and to the
day of her death spoke and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He
was a dreamy youth, who wrote verses and called the Crammer's daughter
his Egeria. She was too clever not to be kind to him, and he adored
her and believed in her to the end, which came before his twenty-first
birthday. He broke his neck out hunting, and died before Betty was
born.

His people, exasperated at the news of the marriage, threatened to try
to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been
needed to get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four.
Egeria was frightened. She compromised for an annuity of two hundred
pounds, to be continued to her child.