bachelor life, but what could he do with two little children? He needed
a woman to take care of him, and who so fitting as his wife's elder
sister? So she had the charge of me from my birth; and for a time I was
weakly, as was but natural, and she was always beside me, night and day
watching over me, and my father nearly as anxious as she. For his land
had come down from father to son for more than three hundred years, and
he would have cared for me merely as his flesh and blood that was to
inherit the land after him. But he needed something to love, for all
that, to most people, he was a stern, hard man, and he took to me as, I
fancy, he had taken to no human being before--as he might have taken to
my mother, if she had had no former life for him to be jealous of. I
loved him back again right heartily. I loved all around me, I believe,
for everybody was kind to me. After a time, I overcame my original
weakness of constitution, and was just a bonny, strong-looking lad whom
every passer-by noticed, when my father took me with him to the nearest
town.

At home I was the darling of my aunt, the tenderly-beloved of my father,
the pet and plaything of the old domestics, the "young master" of the
farm-labourers, before whom I played many a lordly antic, assuming a sort
of authority which sat oddly enough, I doubt not, on such a baby as I
was.

Gregory was three years older than I. Aunt Fanny was always kind to him
in deed and in action, but she did not often think about him, she had
fallen so completely into the habit of being engrossed by me, from the
fact of my having come into her charge as a delicate baby. My father
never got over his grudging dislike to his stepson, who had so innocently
wrestled with him for the possession of my mother's heart. I mistrust
me, too, that my father always considered him as the cause of my mother's