ighten into that of
Feuella.

My father lived upon moderate means in the little seaside town of
Raxton. My mother was his second wife, a distant cousin of the same
name. She was not one of the 'Proud Aylwins,' and yet she must have
had more pride in her heart than all the 'Proud Aylwins' put
together. Her feeling in relation to the strain of Gypsy blood in the
family into which she had married was that of positive terror. She
associated the word 'Gypsy' with everything that is wild, passionate,
and lawless.

One great cause undoubtedly of her partiality for Frank and her
dislike of me was that Frank's blue-eyed Saxon face showed no sign
whatever of the Romany strain, while my swarthy face did.

As I write this, she lives before me with more vividness than my
father, for the reason that her character during my childhood, before
I came to know my father thoroughly--before I came to know what a
marvellous man he was--seemed to be a thousand times more vivid than
his. With her bright grey eyes, her patrician features, I shall see
her while memory lasts. The only differences that ever arose between
my father and my other were connected with the fact that my father
had a former wife. Now and then (not often) my mother would lose her
stoical self-command, and there would come from her an explosion of
jealous anger, stormy and terrible. This was on occasions when she
perceived bat my father's memory retained too vividly the impression
left on it of his love for the wife who was dead--dead, but a rival
still. My father lived in mortal fear of this jealousy. Yet my mother
was a devoted and a fond wife. I remember in especial the flash that
would come from her eyes, the fiery flush that would overspread her
face, whenever she saw my father open certain antique silver casket
which he kept in his escritoire when at home, and carried about with
him when travelling. The casket (I soon learned) contained momentos
of his first wife, between whom and himself there seems to have been
a deep natural sympathy such did not exist between my mother and him.
This first wife he had lost under peculiarly painful circum-stances,
which it is necessary that I should briefly narrate. She had been
drowned before his very eyes that cove beneath the church which I
have already described.

This semicircular indentation at the end of the peninsula or headland
on which the church stood was specially dangerous in two ways. It was
a fatal spot where se