An orphan is taken in by relatives who use her as a servant, and a rich uncle is expected home from India — after which everyone's manners improve remarkably. Holmes sold something like two million books, outsold in her century by almost no American woman except Harriet Beecher Stowe; she wrote orphans, wills and just deserts, and the pleasure of the machinery is that it never once fails to deliver. Fifty-six plates after Eastman Johnson and Richard Redgrave trace the orphan's road from hearth to exile and back, the visual argument of a story where home is the whole of the plot.
