She was intensely proud of the family reputation for beauty,
and even if she could not include herself among “the handsome Gascoynes”,
it certainly gave her a reflected satisfaction to be aware of the epithet.
“I’m like Daddy,” she said sometimes;
“nobody ever calls him handsome,
but he’s a dear all the same
the dearest dear in the world!”
The Reverend Maurice Gascoyne was curate-in-charge of the church of St. John the Baptist in the little fishing village of Skelwick Bay, on the coast of the North Sea.
He was rich in the possession of seven children, but there his luck ended,
for his income, as is often the case, was in exactly inverse ratio to the size of his family.