CHAPTER I.

THE FIVE COUSINS.


Aunt Faith sat alone on the piazza, and sad thoughts crowded into her
heart. It was her birthday,--the first day of June,--and she could
look back over more than half a century, with that mournful retrospect
which birthdays are apt to bring. Aunt Faith had seen trouble, and had
met affliction face to face. When she was still a bride, her husband
died suddenly and left her lonely forever; then, one by one, her
brothers and sisters had been taken, and she was made sole guardian of
their orphan children,--a flock of tender little lambs,--to be
nourished and protected from the cold and the rain, the snare and the
pitfalls, the tempter and the ravening wolf ever prowling around the
fold. Hugh and Sibyl, Tom and Grace, and, last of all, wild little
Bessie from the southern hill-country,--this was her charge. Hugh and
Sibyl Warrington were the children of an elder brother; Tom and Grace
Morris the children of a sister, and Bessie Darrell the only child of
Aunt Faith's youngest sister, who had been the pet of all her family.
For ten long years Aunt Faith had watched over this little band of
orphans, and her heart and hands had been full of care. Children will
be children, and the best mother has her hours of trouble over her
wayward darlings; how much more an aunt, who, without the delicate
maternal instinct as a guide, feels the responsibility to be doubly
heavy!