n and slight of the dignity of ancestry, she had chosen to unite
herself to a gentleman of the name of Mordaunt, who, though possessed of
great talents, an unspotted name, and, for his age, high rank in the
civil service of the East India Company, had--inexpiable misfortune--a
trader for his grandfather! This crime against her "house" Mrs. Eleanor
Fitzhugh resolved never to forgive; and she steadily returned, unopened,
the frequent letters addressed to her by her sister, who pined in her
distant Indian home for a renewal of the old sisterly love which had
watched over and gladdened her life from infancy to womanhood. A long
silence--a silence of many years--succeeded; broken at last by the sad
announcement that the unforgiven one had long since found an early grave
in a foreign land. The letter which brought the intelligence bore the
London post-mark, and was written by Captain Everett; to whom, it was
stated, Mrs. Eleanor Fitzhugh's sister, early widowed, had been united in
second nuptials, and by whom she had borne a son, Frederick Everett, now
nearly twenty years of age. The long-pent-up affection of Mrs. Fitzhugh
for her once idolized sister burst forth at this announcement of her
death with uncontrollable violence; and, as some atonement for her past
sinful obduracy, she immediately invited the husband and son of her
long-lost Mary to Woodlands Manor-House, to be henceforth, she said, she
hoped their home. Soon after their arrival, Mrs. Fitzhugh made a
will--the family property was entirely at her disposal--revoking a former
one, which bequeathed the whole of the real and personal property to a
distant relative whom she had never seen, and by which all was devised to
her nephew, who was immediately proclaimed sole heir to the Fitzhugh
estates, yielding a yearly rental of at least L12,000. Nay, so thoroughly
was she softened towards the memory of her deceased sister, that the
will--of which, as I have stated, no secret was made--provided, in the
event of Frederick dying childless, that the property should pass to his
father, Mary Fitzhugh's second husband.

No two persons could be more unlike than were the father and
son--mentally, morally, physically. Frederick Everett was a fair-haired,
blue-eyed young man, of amiable, caressing manners, gentle disposition,
and ardent, poetic temperament. His father, on the contrary, was a
dark-featured, cold, haughty, repulsive man, ever apparently wrapped up
in selfish and moody