The traveller in school-books, who vouched¹ in dryest tones for the fidelity² to fact of the following narrative³, used to add a ring of truth to it by opening with a nicety of criticism on the heroine’s personality.  People were wrong, he declared, when they surmised⁴ that Baptista Trewthen was a young woman with scarcely emotions or character.  There was nothing in her to love, and nothing to hate—so ran the general opinion.  That she showed few positive qualities was true.  The colours and tones which changing events paint on the faces of active womankind were looked for in vain upon hers.  But still waters run deep; and no crisis had come in the years of her early maidenhood⁵ to demonstrate what lay hidden within her, like metal in a mine.