ost, in no long time afterwards, became unfaithful to its trust; and if
Mrs. Jane heard quarterly, which at any rate she did through the agent,
when he remitted her allowance, she consoled herself as to the captain's
well-being: in due course of things, even this became irregular; he was
far up the country, hunting, fighting, surveying, and what not; and no
wonder that letters, if written at all, which I rather doubt, got lost.
Then there came a long period of positive and protracted silence--months
of it--years of it; barring that her checks for cash were honoured still
at Hancock's, though they could tell her nothing of her lord; so that
Mrs. Tracy was at length seriously recommended by her friends to become
a widow; she tried on the cap, and looked into many mirrors; but, after
long inspection, decided upon still remaining a wife, because the weeds
were so clearly unbecoming. Habit, meanwhile, and that still-existing
old aunt, who seemed resolved to live to a hundred, kept her as before
at Burleigh: and, seeing that a few months after the captain's departure
she had presented the world, not to say her truant lord, with twins, she
had always found something to do in the way of, what she considered,
education, and other juvenile amusement: that is to say, when the
gayeties of a circle of fifteen miles in radius left her any time to
spare in such a process. The twins--a brace of boys--were born and bred
at Burleigh, and had attained severally to twenty years of age, just
before their father came home again as brevet-major-general. But both
they, and that arrival, deserve special detail, each in its own chapter.

CHAPTER II.

THE HEROES.

Mrs. Tracy's sons were as unlike each other as it is well possible for
two human beings to be, both in person and character. Julian, whose
forward and bold spirit gained him from the very cradle every
prerogative of eldership (and he did struggle first into life, too, so
he was the first-born), had grown to be a swarthy, strong, big-boned
man, of the Roman-nosed, or, more physiognomically, the Jewish cast of
countenance; with melo-dramatic elf-locks, large whiskers, and
ungovernable passions; loud, fierce, impetuous; cunning, too, for all
his overbearing clamour; and an embodied personification of those choice
essentials to criminal happiness--a hard heart and a good digestion.
Charles, on the contrary (or, as logicians would say, on the
contradictory), was fair-haired, blue-e