devotion to its rites and ceremonies. Yet, had
we chosen for ourselves, perhaps our different temperaments might, even
in this thing, have asserted themselves, and we might have embraced
sects as diverse as our tastes were several. I shall come to this third
sister presently, of whom I make but passing mention here. She was our
flower, our pearl, our little ewe-lamb--the loveliest and the last--and
I must not trust myself to linger with her memory now, or I shall lose
the thread of my story, and tangle it with digression.

With my Oriental blood there came strange, passionate affection for all
things sharing it, unknown to colder organizations--an affection in
whose very vitality were the seeds of suffering, in whose very strength
was weakness, perhaps in whose very enjoyment, sorrow. I have said my
mother died of an insidious and inscrutable malady, which baffled friend
and physician, when I was five years old. She had been so long ill, so
often alienated from her household for days together, that her death was
a less terrible evil, less suddenly so, at least, than if each morning
had found her at her board, each evening at the family hearth, and
every hour, as would have been the case in health, occupied with her
children.

My father's grief was stern, quiet, solitary; ours, unreasonable and
noisy, but soon over as to manifestation. Yet I must have suffered more
than I knew of, I think, for then occurred the first of those strange
lethargies or seizures that afterward returned at very unequal intervals
during my childhood and early youth, and which roused my father's fears
about my life and intellect itself, and gave me into the hands of a
physician for many years thereof, vigorous, and healthy, and intelligent
otherwise as I felt, and seemed, and _was_.

It was soon after the first settling down of tribulation in our
household to that flat and almost unendurable calm or level that
succeeds affliction, when a void is felt rather than expressed, and when
all outward observances return to their olden habit, as a car backs
slowly from a switch to its accustomed grooves, that a new face appeared
among us, destined to influence, in no slight degree, the happiness of
all who composed the family of Reginald Monfort.

It was summer. The house in which we lived was partly finished in the
rear by wide and extensive galleries above and below, shaded by movable
_jalousies;_ and, on the upper one of these, that on which our
ap