Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter of
their eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to the estates and the baronetcy.

This Thomas--a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penurious
and incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men--now occupied after a
fashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from which
his father had, on approach of age, withdrawn. He sat in Parliament for
the family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen to
be a Lord of the Admiralty. He had married Lady Caroline Pett, a
daughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house in
Arlington Street, where during the session they entertained with a
frugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain. They were known
(and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life was
embittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was in
every sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand why
not, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for having
presented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing.

Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy would
come to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple,
who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr.
Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman.
He _en revanche_ supplied them with abundant food for censure, being
wilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting with
stable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech. The uncle
and aunt alleged--and indeed it was obvious--that the unruly boys passed
on the infection to Miss Diana. Miss Diana never accompanied her
parents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel--again
because Mr. Thomas found it cheap.

In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protective
outer aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up:
mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious.
Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten,
left for London, to be entered at Westminster School. Harry was to
follow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before this
happened, in Oliver's summer holidays. Sir Thomas took the smallpox and
died and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept. Harry took it
too; but pulled through, not much disfigured. Oliver and Diana escaped.

The boys