ould _let_ myself hate you, and strike you. But I
always try and remember what mamma said, and what Mr. Lodore tells us
every Sunday. Yet I find it hard."

"Little hypocrite! little Jew!" burst from her angry lips, and she left
the room in a whirl of rage, not forgetting, however, to write me a very
smooth note before she went to school next morning, which was, with her
usual tact, slipped under my pillow before I awoke; and, after that, all
was outward peace between us for a season.

Evelyn was about sixteen when this occurred, I nearly twelve. The next
year she left school and made her _debut_ in society, and, through her
machinations, no doubt, I was sent away to a distant boarding-school for
two years, coming home only at holiday intervals thereafter to my
dearest baby, my home, my parent, and narrow circle of friends, and
finding Miss Erle more and more in possession of my father's confidence,
even to the arrangement of his papers and participation in the knowledge
of his business transactions, and entirely installed as the head of the
house, which post she maintained ever afterward indomitably.

Singularly enough, however, Mr. Bainrothe seemed secretly to prefer me
at this period, however much he openly inclined to her, and he lost no
occasion of privately speaking to me in rapturous terms (such as I never
heard him employ in the presence of Evelyn and my father) of his only
son, then absent in Germany engaged in the prosecution of his studies,
but to return home, he told me, to remain, as soon as he had completed
his majority.

It was only through our knowledge of his son's age, and his admissions
as to the time of his own early marriage, that we arrived at any
estimate of Mr. Bainrothe's years; for, as I have said, Time, in his
case, had omitted what he so rarely forgets to imprint--his sign manual
on his exterior.

CHAPTER III.

The school to which I was sent was half a day's journey from the city of
our residence, situated in a small but ancient town of Revolutionary
notoriety. The river, very wide at that point, was shaded by
willow-trees to some extent along its banks, immediately in front of the
Academy of St. Mark's, and beyond it to a considerable distance on
either hand. The town itself was an old-fashioned, primitive village
rather than burgh, quaintly built, and little adorned by modern taste or
improvement; but the air was fine and elastic, the water
unexceptionable, and bathing and boa