Read it through once

Whatever the original intention of the Doctor may have been as to the tenure of the cottage, it has to be recorded that it lasted for thirty years, witnessing the best and most successful of Miss Mitford’s literary efforts and her short-lived triumph as a dramatist; marking the gradual decay and death of Mrs. Mitford, and the increasing selfishness of the Doctor, the results of which, when he died, were his daughter’s only inheritance.