orphan children, he would expose their relentless and malignant
conduct towards that sister, and do his best to turn the
circumstances against Mr. Seacombe's election. That gentleman
and Lord T. knew well enough that the Crimsworths were an
unscrupulous and determined race; they knew also that they had
influence in the borough of X----; and, making a virtue of
necessity, they consented to defray the expenses of my education.
I was sent to Eton, where I remained ten years, during which
space of time Edward and I never met. He, when he grew up,
entered into trade, and pursued his calling with such diligence,
ability, and success, that now, in his thirtieth year, he was
fast making a fortune. Of this I was apprised by the occasional
short letters I received from him, some three or four times a
year; which said letters never concluded without some expression
of determined enmity against the house of Seacombe, and some
reproach to me for living, as he said, on the bounty of that
house. At first, while still in boyhood, I could not understand
why, as I had no parents, I should not be indebted to my uncles
Tynedale and Seacombe for my education; but as I grew up, and
heard by degrees of the persevering hostility, the hatred till
death evinced by them against my father--of the sufferings of my
mother--of all the wrongs, in short, of our house--then did I
conceive shame of the dependence in which I lived, and form a
resolution no more to take bread from hands which had refused to
minister to the necessities of my dying mother. It was by these
feelings I was influenced when I refused the Rectory of
Seacombe, and the union with one of my patrician cousins.

"An irreparable breach thus being effected between my uncles and
myself, I wrote to Edward; told him what had occurred, and