CHAPTER II--In which Sir Jeoffry encounters his offspring


In a remote wing of the house, in barren, ill-kept rooms, the poor
infants of the dead lady had struggled through their brief lives, and
given them up, one after the other. Sir Jeoffry had not wished to see
them, nor had he done so, but upon the rarest occasions, and then nearly
always by some untoward accident. The six who had died, even their
mother had scarcely wept for; her weeping had been that they should have
been fated to come into the world, and when they went out of it she knew
she need not mourn their going as untimely. The two who had not
perished, she had regarded sadly day by day, seeing they had no beauty
and that their faces promised none. Naught but great beauty would have
excused their existence in their father's eyes, as beauty might have
helped them to good matches which would have rid him of them. But 'twas
the sad ill fortune of the children Anne and Barbara to have been treated
by Nature in a way but niggardly. They were pale young misses, with
insignificant faces and snub noses, resembling an aunt who died a
spinster, as they themselves seemed most likely to. Sir Jeoffry could
not bear the sight of them, and they fled at the sound of his footsteps,
if it so happened that by chance they heard it, huddling together in
corners, and slinking behind doors or anything big enough to hide them.
They had no playthings and no companions and no pleasures but such as the
innocent invention of childhood contrives for itself.

After their mother's death a youth desolate and strange indeed lay before
them. A spinster who was a poor relation was the only person of
respectable breeding who ever came near them. To save herself from
genteel starvation, she had offered herself for the place of governess to