as left to her own
choice to say which of the two she would prefer to live with. In all
other respects the condition was imperative. If she forfeited it,
excepting, of course, the case of the deaths of both her guardians, she
was only to have a life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it,
the money itself was to become her own possession on the day when she
completed her twenty-first year.

This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by surprise.
I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed her sister-in-law's
death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she had afterward watched over
the welfare of the little motherless child--I remembered the innumerable
claims she had established in this way on her brother's confidence in
her affection for his orphan daughter, and I was, therefore, naturally
amazed at the appearance of a condition in his will which seemed to
show a positive distrust of Lady Westwick's undivided influence over the
character and conduct of her niece.

A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a little
after-consideration of some of my deceased friend's peculiarities of
disposition and feeling, to which I had not hitherto attached sufficient
importance, were enough to make me understand the motives by which he
had been influenced in providing for the future of his child.

Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and
eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small farmer,
and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance, never to be
ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of society to influence
his own settled opinions on social questions in general.

Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on such
principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to say, held some
strangely heterodox opinions on the modern education of girls, and on
the evil influence of society over the characters of women in general.
Out of the strength of those opinions, and out of the certainty of his
conviction that his sister did not share them, had grown that condition
in his will which removed his daughter from the influence of her aunt
for six consecutive weeks in every year. Lady Westwick was the most
light-hearted, the most generous, the most impulsive of women; capable,
when any serious occasion called it forth, of all that was devoted and
self-sacrificing, but, at other and ordinary times, constitution