rly three years, cost her too great a pang; and she
could not bear for yet a while to be with them, and to submit to take
only the second place. So she and her father went away to a house at
Bury St. Edmunds, not far from us, where they lived, and where she
spoiled her eldest nephew and niece in private. It was the year after we
came home that Mr. B, the Jamaica planter, died, who left her the half
of his fortune; and then I heard, for the first time, how the worthy
gentleman had been greatly enamoured of her in Jamaica, and, though she
had refused him, had thus shown his constancy to her. Heaven knows how
much property of Aunt Hetty's Monsieur Miles hath already devoured!
the price of his commission and outfit; his gorgeous uniforms; his
play-debts and little transactions in the Minories;--do you think,
sirrah, I do not know what human nature is; what is the cost of
Pall Mall taverns, petits soupers, play even in moderation--at the
Cocoa-Tree; and that a gentleman cannot purchase all these enjoyments
with the five hundred a year which I allow him? Aunt Hetty declares she
has made up her mind to be an old maid. "I made a vow never to marry
until I could find a man as good as my dear father," she said; "and I
never did, Sir George. No, my dearest Theo, not half as good; and Sir
George may put that in his pipe and smoke it."

And yet when the good General died (calm, and full of years, and glad to
depart), I think it was my wife who shed the most tears. "I weep because
I think I did not love him enough," said the tender creature: whereas
Hetty scarce departed from her calm, at least outwardly and before any
of us; talks of him constantly still, as though he were alive; recalls
his merry sayings, his gentle, kind ways with his children (when she
brightens up and looks herself quite a girl again), and sits cheerfully
looking up to the slab in church which records his name and some of his
virtues, and for once tells no lies.

I had fancied, sometimes, that my brother Hal, for whom Hetty had a
juvenile passion, always retained a hold of her heart; and when he came
to see us, ten years ago, I told him of this childish romance of Het's,
with the hope, I own, that he would ask her to replace Mrs. Fanny, who
had been gathered to her fathers, and regarding whom my wife (with
her usual propensity to consider herself a miserable sinner) always
reproached herself, because, forsooth, she did not regret Fanny enough.
Hal, when he came