ss lay in things not so much on the surface. It was
more deep and abiding in its character; and consisted in the false
estimate which he made of the things around him. He had learned to value
wealth as a substitute for mind--for morals--for all that is lofty, and
all that should be leading, in the consideration of society. He valued
few things beside. He had different emotions for the rich from those
which he entertained for the poor; and, from perceiving that among men,
money could usurp all places--could defeat virtue, command respect
denied to morality and truth, and secure a real worship when the Deity
must be content with shows and symbols--he gradually gave it the chief
place in his regard. He valued wealth as the instrument of authority. It
secured him power; a power, however, which he had no care to employ, and
which he valued only as tributary to the maintenance of that haughty
ascendency over men which was his heart's first passion. He was neither
miser nor mercenary; he did not labor to accumulate--perhaps because he
was a lucky accumulator without any painstaking of his own: but he was,
by nature an aristocrat, and not unwilling to compel respect through the
means of money, as through any other more noble agency of intellect or
morals.

There was only one respect in which a likeness between the fortunes of
the two brothers might be found to exist. After a grateful union of a
few years, they had both lost their wives. A single child, in the case
of each, had preserved and hallowed to them the memories of their
mothers. To the younger brother Ralph, a son had been born, soothing the
sorrows of the exile, and somewhat compensating his loss. To William
Colleton, the elder brother, his wife had left a single and very lovely
daughter, the sweet and beautiful Edith, a girl but a few months younger
than her cousin Ralph. It was the redeeming feature, in the case of the
surviving parents, that they each gave to their motherless children, the
whole of that affection--warm in both cases--which had been enjoyed by
the departed mothers.

Separated from each other, for years, by several hundred miles of
uncultivated and untravelled forest, the brothers did not often meet;
and the bonds of brotherhood waxed feebler and feebler, with the swift
progress of successive years. Still, they corresponded, and in a tone
and temper that seemed to answer for the existence of feelings, which
neither, perhaps, would have been so forwa