was all Gregory's fault, and owed him an additional grudge for
having hastened my birth. He had another grudge against him before long.
My mother began to sink the day after I was born. My father sent to
Carlisle for doctors, and would have coined his heart's blood into gold
to save her, if that could have been; but it could not. My aunt Fanny
used to say sometimes, that she thought that Helen did not wish to live,
and so just let herself die away without trying to take hold on life; but
when I questioned her, she owned that my mother did all the doctors bade
her do, with the same sort of uncomplaining patience with which she had
acted through life. One of her last requests was to have Gregory laid in
her bed by my side, and then she made him take hold of my little hand.
Her husband came in while she was looking at us so, and when he bent
tenderly over her to ask her how she felt now, and seemed to gaze on us
two little half-brothers, with a grave sort of kindness, she looked up in
his face and smiled, almost her first smile at him; and such a sweet
smile! as more besides aunt Fanny have said. In an hour she was dead.
Aunt Fanny came to live with us. It was the best thing that could be
done. My father would have been glad to return to his old mode of
bachelor life, but what could he do with two little children? He needed
a woman to take care of him, and who so fitting as his wife's elder
sister? So she had the charge of me from my birth; and for a time I was
weakly, as was but natural, and she was always beside me, night and day
watching over me, and my father nearly as anxious as she. For his land
had come down from father to son for more than three hundred years, and
he would have cared for me merely as his flesh and blood that was to
inherit the land after him. But he needed something to love, for all
that, to most people, he was a stern, hard man, and he took to me as, I
fancy, he had taken to no human being before--as he might have taken to
my mother, if she had had no former life for him to be jealous of. I
loved him back again right heartily. I loved all around me, I believe,
for everybody was kind to me. After a time, I overcame my original
weakness of constitution, and was just a bonny, strong-looking lad whom
every passer-by noticed, when my father took me with him to the nearest
town.

At home I was the darling of my aunt, the tenderly-beloved of my father,
the pet and plaything of the old domes