summer day.

It was not summer yet--scarcely spring--and the sun, I say, was drawing
to its setting, lighting up the large clear panes of the windows as with
burnished gold. The house, the ornamental grounds, the estate around,
all belonged to Mr. Verner. It had come to him by bequest, not by
entailed inheritance. Busybodies were fond of saying that it never ought
to have been his; that, if the strict law of right and justice had been
observed, it would have gone to his elder brother; or, rather, to that
elder brother's son. Old Mr. Verner, the father of these two brothers,
had been a modest country gentleman, until one morning when he awoke to
the news that valuable mines had been discovered on his land. The mines
brought him in gold, and in his later years he purchased this estate,
pulled down the house that was upon it--a high, narrow, old thing,
looking like a crazy tower or a capacious belfry--and had erected this
one, calling it "Verner's Pride."

An appropriate name. For if ever poor human man was proud of a house he
has built, old Mr. Verner was proud of that--proud to folly. He laid out
money on it in plenty; he made the grounds belonging to it beautiful and
seductive as a fabled scene from fairyland; and he wound up by leaving
it to the younger of his two sons.

These two sons constituted all his family. The elder of them had gone
into the army early, and left for India; the younger had remained always
with his father, the helper of his money-making, the sharer of the
planning out and building of Verner's Pride, the joint resident there
after it was built. The elder son--Captain Verner then--paid one visit
only to England, during which visit he married, and took his wife out
with him when he went back. These long-continued separations, however
much we may feel inclined to gloss over the fact, do play strange havoc
with home affections, wearing them away inch by inch.

The years went on and on. Captain Verner became Colonel Sir Lionel
Verner, and a boy of his had been sent home in due course, and was at
Eton. Old Mr. Verner grew near to death. News went out to India that his
days were numbered, and Sir Lionel Verner was instructed to get leave of
absence, if possible, and start for home without a day's loss, if he
would see his father alive. "If possible," you observe, they put to the
request; for the Sikhs were at that time giving trouble in our Indian
possessions, and Colonel Verner was one of the experie