ble to bear personal
testimony to the truth of many of the particulars which I am now about
to relate. I knew her father, and her younger sister Rosamond; and I was
acquainted with the Frenchman who became Rosamond's husband. These are
the persons of whom it will be principally necessary for me to speak.
They are the only prominent characters in my story.

Miss Welwyn's father died some years since. I remember him very
well--though he never excited in me, or in any one else that I ever
heard of, the slightest feeling of interest. When I have said that he
inherited a very large fortune, amassed during his father's time, by
speculations of a very daring, very fortunate, but not always very
honorable kind, and that he bought this old house with the notion of
raising his social position, by making himself a member of our landed
aristocracy in these parts, I have told you as much about him, I
suspect, as you would care to hear. He was a thoroughly commonplace man,
with no great virtues and no great vices in him. He had a little heart,
a feeble mind, an amiable temper, a tall figure, and a handsome face.
More than this need not, and cannot, be said on the subject of Mr.
Welwyn's character.

I must have seen the late Mrs. Welwyn very often as a child; but I
cannot say that I remember anything more of her than that she was tall
and handsome, and very generous and sweet-tempered toward me when I
was in her company. She was her husband's superior in birth, as in
everything else; was a great reader of books in all languages; and
possessed such admirable talents as a musician, that her wonderful
playing on the organ is remembered and talked of to this day among the
old people in our country houses about here. All her friends, as I have
heard, were disappointed when she married Mr. Welwyn, rich as he was;
and were afterward astonished to find her preserving the appearance, at
least, of being perfectly happy with a husband who, neither in mind nor
heart, was worthy of her.

It was generally supposed (and I have no doubt correctly) that she
found her great happiness and her great consolation in her little girl
Ida--now the lady from whom we have just parted. The child took after
her mother from the first--inheriting her mother's fondness for books,
her mother's love of music, her mother's quick sensibilities, and, more
than all, her mother's quiet firmness, patience, and loving kindness of
disposition. From Ida's earliest years, Mr