Justifiable as his reasoning was, plausible as it may seem, yet he
would have done better to have trusted the instinct that was in
conflict with it. Though the same blood ran in her veins as in
those of Colonel Bishop, yet hers was free of the vices that tainted
her uncle's, for these vices were not natural to that blood; they
were, in his case, acquired. Her father, Tom Bishop - that same
Colonel Bishop's brother - had been a kindly, chivalrous, gentle
soul, who, broken-hearted by the early death of a young wife, had
abandoned the Old World and sought an anodyne for his grief in
the New. He had come out to the Antilles, bringing with him his
little daughter, then five years of age, and had given himself up
to the life of a planter. He had prospered from the first, as men
sometimes will who care nothing for prosperity. Prospering, he
had bethought him of his younger brother, a soldier at home
reputed somewhat wild. He had advised him to come out to Barbados;
and the advice, which at another season William Bishop might have
scorned, reached him at a moment when his wildness was beginning to
bear such fruit that a change of climate was desirable. William
came, and was admitted by his generous brother to a partnership
in the prosperous plantation. Some six years later, when Arabella
was fifteen, her father died, leaving her in her uncle's
guardianship. It was perhaps his one mistake. But the goodness of
his own nature coloured his views of other men; moreover, himself,
he had conducted the education of his daughter, giving her an
independence of character upon which perhaps he counted unduly. As
things were, there was little love between uncle and niece. But
she was dutiful to him, and he was circumspect in his behaviour
before her. All his life, and for all his wildness, he had gone
in a certain awe of his brother, whose worth he had the wit to
recognize; and now it was almost as if some of that awe was