f nine years old, who had recently come into her hands;
singularly gifted and beautiful, but lamed for life, it was feared, and
a great sufferer physically from the effects of the fatal hip-disease
that had destroyed the strength and usefulness of one limb, and impaired
his constitution.

Mrs. Stanbury herself was a lady-like and pretty woman, fair and
graceful, and her daughter Laura closely resembled her; both sweet
specimens of unpretending womanhood; both devoted to the discharge of
their simple duties and to one another; both entirely estimable.

Norman Stanbury was of a different type. He had probably inherited from
his father his manly and robust person, his open, dauntless, dark, and
handsome face, in which there was so much character that you hardly
looked for intellect, or perhaps at a brief glance confounded one with
the other. He was the avowed and devoted swain of my sister Evelyn, from
the time when they first chased fireflies together, up to their
dancing-school adolescence, and for me maintained a disinterested,
brotherly regard that was never slow to manifest itself in any time of
need, or even in the furtherance of my childish whims. Our relations
with this family were most friendly and agreeable. There never was any
undue familiarity; my father's reserve, and their own dignity, would of
themselves have precluded that certain precursor to the decline of
superficial friendship; but a consistent and somewhat ceremonious
intercourse was preserved from first to last, that could scarcely be
called intimacy.

Between George Gaston and myself alone existed that perfect freedom of
speech and intuitive understanding that lie at the root of all true and
deep affection. His delicacy of appearance, his stunted stature, his
invalid requisitions, nay, his very deformity, for his twisted limb
amounted to this, put aside all thought of infantile flirtation (for we
know that, strange as it may seem, such a thing does exist) from the
first hour of our acquaintance. He always seemed to me much younger than
he was, or than I was--as boys, even under ordinary circumstances, are
apt to appear to girls of their own age, from their slower development
of mind and manner, if not of body.

But this lovely waxen boy, so frail and spiritual as to look almost
angelic, and certainly very far my superior intellectually, seemed from
his helplessness peculiarly infantile in comparison with my robust
energy, and became consequently,