thereafter: the rooms were still pointed out in which
Washington and Lafayette had slept, as well as the
small alcove where the dashing Bart de Klyn passed
the night whenever he drove over in his coach with
outriders from Bow Hill to Barnegat and the sea.

With the death of Colonel Creighton Cobden, who
held a commission in the War of 1812, all this magnificence
of living had changed, and when Morton
Cobden, the father of Jane and Lucy, inherited the
estate, but little was left except the Manor House,
greatly out of repair, and some invested property
which brought in but a modest income. On his
death-bed Morton Cobden's last words were a prayer
to Jane, then eighteen, that she would watch over
and protect her younger sister, a fair-haired child
of eight, taking his own and her dead mother's place,
a trust which had so dominated Jane's life that it
had become the greater part of her religion.

Since then she had been the one strong hand in
the home, looking after its affairs, managing their
income, and watching over every step of her sister's
girlhood and womanhood. Two years before she had
placed Lucy in one of the fashionable boarding-
schools of Philadelphia, there to study "music and
French," and to perfect herself in that "grace of
manner and charm of conversation," which the two
maiden ladies who presided over its fortunes claimed
in their modest advertisements they were so competent