“Yes – I am an – orphan,” she sighed in answer to his question. “My mother died two years ago and my father last week. He had not been well for ‒ quite some time.”
She tried not to let her voice break as she spoke to him, knowing that here in London she felt even more lonely and lost than she had in Little Hamble when she had discovered that she had not only lost her father but also her home.
It had never struck her for a single moment that, although they had always been hard up, there would be no money at all left for her when her father died.
His illness had been expensive and she knew too late that she should have taken matters into her own hands and dismissed the servants and sold several of the horses.
She should have cut down in all sorts of different ways long before she was fac
