a
good, and she bore him two children, boy Lancelot and girl Marjorie, and
died for the life of the lass. Her death, so I learned, was the doom of
Lancelot Amber the elder, and there were two babes left in the wood of
the world, with, like the children in the ballad, such claims upon two
uncles as blood might urge and pity supplement. These two uncles, as
Lancelot imagined them to me, were men of vastly different stuff and
spirit, as you may sometimes find such flaming contrasts in families.
The elder, Marmaduke Amber, used the sea, and was, it seems, as fine a
florid piece of sea flesh as an island's king could wish to welcome. His
brother, Nathaniel, had been a city merchant, piling up moneys in the
Levant trade, and now lived in a fine house out in the swelling country
beyond Sendennis, with a fine sea-view. Him I had seen once or twice; a
lean monkey creature with a wrinkled walnut of a face and bright, unkind
eyes. He was all for leaving the boy of three and the girl of two to the
small mercies of some charity school, but the mariner brother gathered
the two forlornlings to his great heart, and with him they had lived and
thriven ever since. Now it seems Captain Marmaduke was on a voyage to
the Bermudas and taking the maid with him, while the boy, to better his
schooling and strengthen his body with sea air, was sent to Sendennis to
stay with his other uncle, Nathaniel Amber, now, to all appearance,
reconciled to the existence of his young relative. This uncle, as I
gathered, did not at first approve overmuch of Lancelot taking lessons
in common with a single mercer's son, but Mr. Davies, I believe, spoke
so well of me that the arrangement was allowed to hold.

But after lesson hours were done Lancelot had always to go back to his
uncle's, and though I walked part of the way, or all the way, with him
most days of the week, I was never bidden inside those doors. Lancelot
told me that he had more than once besought leave to bring me in, but
that the old gentleman was obdurate. So, save in those hours of study in
the parrot-papered room, I saw but little of Lancelot.

I never expected to be asked inside the doors of the great house where
Lancelot's days were passed, and I did not feel any injustice in the
matter. I was only a mercer's son, while Lancelot derived of gentlefolk,
and it never entered into my mind to question the existing order of
things, or to wish to force my way into places where I was not wanted.
Exc