s. Welwyn undertook the whole
superintendence of her education. The two were hardly ever apart, within
doors or without. Neighbors and friends said that the little girl
was being brought up too fancifully, and was not enough among other
children, was sadly neglected as to all reasonable and practical
teaching, and was perilously encouraged in those dreamy and imaginative
tendencies of which she had naturally more than her due share. There
was, perhaps, some truth in this; and there might have been still more,
if Ida had possessed an ordinary character, or had been reserved for
an ordinary destiny. But she was a strange child from the first, and a
strange future was in store for her.

Little Ida reached her eleventh year without either brother or sister to
be her playfellow and companion at home. Immediately after that period,
however, her sister Rosamond was born. Though Mr. Welwyn's own desire
was to have had a son, there were, nevertheless, great rejoicings yonder
in the old house on the birth of this second daughter. But they were all
turned, only a few months afterward, to the bitterest grief and despair:
the Grange lost its mistress. While Rosamond was still an infant in
arms, her mother died.

Mrs. Welwyn had been afflicted with some disorder after the birth of
her second child, the name of which I am not learned enough in medical
science to be able to remember. I only know that she recovered from it,
to all appearance, in an unexpectedly short time; that she suffered a
fatal relapse, and that she died a lingering and a painful death. Mr.
Welwyn (who, in after years, had a habit of vaingloriously describing
his marriage as "a love-match on both sides") was really fond of his
wife in his own frivolous, feeble way, and suffered as acutely as such
a man could suffer, during the latter days of her illness, and at the
terrible time when the doctors, one and all, confessed that her life
was a thing to be despaired of. He burst into irrepressible passions
of tears, and was always obliged to leave the sick-room whenever Mrs.
Welwyn spoke of her approaching end. The last solemn words of the dying
woman, the tenderest messages that she could give, the dearest parting
wishes that she could express, the most earnest commands that she could
leave behind her, the gentlest reasons for consolation that she could
suggest to the survivors among those who loved her, were not poured into
her husband's ear, but into her child's. From