ngs. You may
guess," she added in a softer tone, "that my feelings are mostly
concerned with my brother. We were very fond of each other. The
difference of our ages was not very great. I suppose you know he is a
little younger than I am. He was a sensitive boy. He had the habit of
brooding. It is no use concealing from you that neither of us was happy
at home. You have heard, no doubt . . . Yes? Well, I was made still
more unhappy and hurt--I don't mind telling you that. He made his way to
some distant relations of our mother's people who I believe were not
known to my father at all. I don't wish to judge their action."

I interrupted Mrs. Fyne here. I had heard. Fyne was not very
communicative in general, but he was proud of his father-in-law--"Carleon
Anthony, the poet, you know." Proud of his celebrity without approving
of his character. It was on that account, I strongly suspect, that he
seized with avidity upon the theory of poetical genius being allied to
madness, which he got hold of in some idiotic book everybody was reading
a few years ago. It struck him as being truth itself--illuminating like
the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once,
just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as
so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and
the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me
in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that
genius was not transmissible.

I said only "Oh! Isn't it?" and he thought he had silenced me by an
unanswerable argument. But he continued to talk of his glorious father-
in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me
how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife naturally
addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a
friendly consultation as to the boy's future, the incensed (but always
refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished _badinage_ which
offended mortally the Liverpool people. This witty outbreak of what was
in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless that they
simply kept the boy. They let him go to sea not because he was in their
way but because he begged hard to be allowed to go.

"Oh! You do know," said Mrs. Fyne after a pause. "Well--I felt myself
very much abandoned. Then his choice of life--so extraordinary, so
unfortunate, I may say. I was v