ten years old, and her schoolboy cousins were teasing her, and at
every Twelfth-day party since she and he had come together as by
right. There was something irresistible in her great soft plaintive
brown eyes, though she was scarcely pretty otherwise, and we used to
call her the White Doe of Rylstone. Torwood was six or seven years
older, and no one supposed that he seriously cared for her, till she
was sixteen. Then, when my father spoke point blank to him about
Adela, he was driven into owning what he wished.

My father thought it utter absurdity. The connection was not
pleasant to him; Mrs. Deerhurst was always looked on as a designing
widow, who managed to marry off her daughters cleverly, and he could
believe no good of Emily.

Now Adela always had more power with papa than any of us. She had a
coaxing way, which his stately old-school courtesy never could
resist. She used when we were children to beg for holidays, and get
treats for us; and even now, many a request which we should never
have dared to utter, she could, with her droll arch way, make him
think the most sensible thing in the world.

What odd things people can do who have lived together like brothers
and sisters! I can hardly help laughing when I think of Torwood
coming disconsolately up from the library, and replying, in answer to
our vigorous demands, that his lordship had some besotted notion past
all reason.

Then we pressed him harder--Adela with indignation, and I with
sympathy--till we forced out of him that he had been forbidden ever
to think or speak again of Emily, and all his faith in her laughed to