I saw them entering the carriage which was to
take them away, and realised for the first time
that I was to remain behind alone with Aunt
Anne, my grief resembled frenzy. They could
not drive off and leave me in that state, yet
every attempt at consolation only made me
worse. It was unreasonable, vexatious, and
absurd; but the very folly of children makes
them strong. I saw my father and his wife
exchange perplexed and distressed looks; then
I heard her whisper timidly, with her hand on
his arm, and her dark eyes raised to his,
"Shall we take her, William?"

He could not resist that pleading look to
which paternal weakness in his own heart
responded; they did not exactly take me, indeed,
but I followed them in another carriage with
my maid. We joined them at the station, and
I accompanied them to the little seaside town
up the coast, where they spent their honeymoon.
On a beach like this I played and wandered
with my dear young stepmother, and heard
my genial father's happy voice calling us his two
little girls. Very often when I go out alone
of an evening and wander on the shore, I see
myself a child again, with my hand in her kind
hand. The tide which murmurs up to my feet
is the tide of those bygone years; the faces
which come out of the darkness of the past
are those two dear faces, and I am happy, oh!
very happy, and I pity those, from my heart I
pity those, to whom such remembrances only
bring sorrow.

Lady William Sydney's honours did not
deprive me of my governess. She continued to
teach me until my brother William was born,
and though other cares then partly took her
from me, she still superintended my education.
The birth of that child was a great event in
our circle. My father was never weary of
looking at and admiring him, and I loved him
more than I can say. He was like his mother,
and I believe I loved him for her sake as well
as for his own. He had her smile and her eyes,
and though he was sadly indulged, he had her
sweetness and rare charm. Every one loved
that boy, so what wonder that I, his sister, and
his elder by ten years, should love him with
something of a mother's passion in my childish
heart! He was my treasure and my darling,
and I firmly believed this world held not another
child so beautiful and so good as my little
brother.

I was fifteen and William was five years old
when my dear young stepmother one evening
complained of a sore throat. She complained still
more the next morning. The doctor was sent
for, and his first act was to order the children
out of the house. Spite of my protests and my
tears, we were at once removed to the abode of
my stepmother's cousin, a widowed Mrs. Gibson,
who lived with her two children at the
other end of the village.

Mrs. Gibson was a newcomer amongst us.
She owned two little cottages by the sea, in one
of which she resided. She was a lady, but she
was poor and I knew it; I did not know,
however, that she lived in a house so small and so
dreary as that to which Martha Vincent, my
maid, now took William and me. The ruinous
aspect of the place without, the low mean rooms
within, depressed me, and when I went up to
the apartment assigned to us, and looked down
on the poor bare garden below, I felt strangely
disconsolate.

"That's Rosebower," glibly said little Ellen
Gibson, who had followed me in.

''Ma wants a tenant, but she can't get
one."

A sky black as ink and which spoke of
coming rain, lowered above a dilapidated cottage.
A weather-stained board with the words TO LET
upon it stared at me over the garden hedge;
but, young as I was, I wondered Mrs. Gibson
expected a tenant for this desolate dwelling.
The garden had gone wild and was full of
weeds. Clematis had so overrun the porch
that the door was half hidden with it. The roof
looked mossy and insecure, and the window
panes were shattered or broken. I thought of
my father's Elizabethan mansion, so warm and
red in the sunshine, of the old ancestral elms
which grew around it, of the sunny garden and
the fountain, and, above all, I thought of my
dear stepmother, from whose presence I had
been so ruthlessly banished, and hiding my face
in my hands, I began to cry.

"What are you crying for?" asked Ellen
Gibson crossly. "William," she called out, "do
come and look at her—she's crying."

"Hush!" said I, showing her the bed on
which my little brother already lay sleeping,
with his rosy face turned to us; "do not waken
him."

"I don't mean him," tartly replied Ellen,
shaking her golden curls, "I mean my brother
William," she added, nodding towards the
garden where a young man was busy digging.

I peeped down at him, then drew back a
little sullenly, I fear; it seemed as if there
should be no William save mine, and I suppose
Ellen, though by some years my junior, had the
same feeling, for she said, with a little scornful
toss of her pretty head,

"Is that stupid little boy called William?"

I felt my cheeks burn with indignation.

"He is not stupid," I replied, hotly; "he is
very clever."

"He is stupid," persisted Ellen; "William
says so."

If my William was perfect, her William was
infallible, and his sentence was without appeal.

"William is not stupid," I said again, and
I added, with stinging emphasis, "and he is not
awkward, not at all—he knows how to sit on
a chair, and how to avoid treading on people's
clothes."

The words were repented as soon as uttered,
for though William Gibson was awkward, and
though he fidgetted on his chair so as to make
me unhappy, though he had trod on and torn
my stepmother's dress when he came to our
house with his mother and sister, I had no wish
to make impertinent comments. But, to my