windings, so suggestive of secret meetings, were secret meetings
desirable; groves of scented shrubs exhaling their perfume; cascades and
rippling fountains; mossy dells, concealing the sweet primrose, the
sweeter violet; and verdant, sunny spots open to the country round, to
the charming distant scenery. These open spots had their benches, where
you might sit and feast the eyes through the live-long summer day.

It was not summer yet--scarcely spring--and the sun, I say, was drawing
to its setting, lighting up the large clear panes of the windows as with
burnished gold. The house, the ornamental grounds, the estate around,
all belonged to Mr. Verner. It had come to him by bequest, not by
entailed inheritance. Busybodies were fond of saying that it never ought
to have been his; that, if the strict law of right and justice had been
observed, it would have gone to his elder brother; or, rather, to that
elder brother's son. Old Mr. Verner, the father of these two brothers,
had been a modest country gentleman, until one morning when he awoke to
the news that valuable mines had been discovered on his land. The mines
brought him in gold, and in his later years he purchased this estate,
pulled down the house that was upon it--a high, narrow, old thing,
looking like a crazy tower or a capacious belfry--and had erected this
one, calling it "Verner's Pride."

An appropriate name. For if ever poor human man was proud of a house he
has built, old Mr. Verner was proud of that--proud to folly. He laid out
money on it in plenty; he made the grounds belonging to it beautiful and
seductive as a fabled scene from fairyland; and he wound up by leaving
it to the younger of his two sons.

These two sons constituted all his family. The elder of them had gone
into the army early, and left for India; the younger had remained always