Miss Esperance and Mr. Wycherly

the long version

"...the story of of a lovely old lady in a back-water English village who possesses a wealth of unapplied motherliness, which as opportunity offers, she puts into use. The chief of her protégés is a gentle scholar who confessed to a pathetic weakness for the bottle, and whose broken life she undertook to strengthen. Two little boys, kinsmen to Miss Esperance, being orphaned, also are confided to her care, and the middle-aged bachelor with shattered ambitions and the elderly woman with unsatisfied affections devote themselves to making fine, manly fellows of these two"--Review in The Book Buyer, November, 1908.