d ridden ponies, tickled for trout,
bird-nested, tumbled off trees, out of duck-punts, through forbidden
ice, and into every form of juvenile disgrace, together as boy and
girl. Her father and mine had been college friends, and (I believe)
had both fallen in love with my mother, at a College ball, and my
father won--but all on an understanding of honourable combat.
Denistoun set out to travel, quite in the traditional way of the
Rejected One. He was a Yorkshire squire with plenty of money, and
could afford the prescribed cure. He travelled as far as to
Virginia, U.S.A., where he halted, and wooed and won the heiress of a
wide estate of cotton and tobacco and a great Palladian house, all
devastated and ruined by the War, in which her father had fallen,
one of Lee's pet leaders of cavalry. . . . Yes, I know it sounds
like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing
happened. . . . Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic
portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were
living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's
duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted
Princess across the seas to Yorkshire: where in due course she bore
him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who
eventually came into the property but doesn't come into the story.

In the meantime it had happened that _I_ saw the light. . . .
My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my
father married again. My sister Sally--the recipient of those long
letters you see me inditing o' nights--is my step-sister, and an
adored one at that.

There you have the family history, or enough of it. The old
friendship between my father and Squire Denistoun had never been
broken; and now that death had taken away the last excuse for a
rivalry which had been felt but to be renounced, Constantia and I--
unconscious brats--shared holidays, as it chanced at my home or hers,
in nefarious poaching beside Avon or in gallops between her northern
moors and the sea.

That is all, or almost all. I have to add that, having fallen into
most scrapes with her, I ended by proposing one in which she gently
but decisively declined to share the risk. . . . I am inclined to
think that, having been so frank with her, and so frequent, in
confidences about others to whom my heart was lost, she may have
missed the bloom on the recital. . . . But there it was; and that's
that,