“Dearer—­a thousand times dearer to me than ever,” whispered he, as he fondly embraced her, “and those sweet pledges of our love!”

“Ah, don’t mention them,” interrupted his lady in a languid tone.  “How very provoking!  I hate girls so—­and two of them—­oh!” and she sighed deeply.  Her husband sighed too; but from a different cause.  The nurse now appeared, and approached with her helpless charges; and both parents, for the first time looked on their own offspring.

“What nice little creatures!” said the delighted father, as, taking them in his arms, he imprinted the first kiss on the innocent faces of his daughters, and then held them to their mother; who, turning from them with disgust, exclaimed, “How can you kiss them, Harry?  They are so ugly, and they squall so!  Oh do, for heaven’s sake, take them away!  And see, there is poor Psyche quite wretched at being so long away from me.  Pray, put her on the bed.”

“She will grow fond of her babies by-and-by,” said poor Henry to himself, as he quitted the apartment, with feelings very different from those with which he entered it.

At the pressing solicitations of her husband, the fashionable mother was prevailed upon to attempt nursing one of her poor starving infants; but the first trial proved also the last, as she declared nothing upon earth should ever induce her to perform so odious an office; and as Henry’s entreaties and her aunts’ remonstrances served alike to irritate and agitate her, the contest was, by the advice of her medical attendant, completely given up.  A wet-nurse was therefore procured; but as she refused to undertake both children, and the old gentleman would not hear of having two such encumbrances in his family, it was settled, to the unspeakable delight of the maiden sisters, that the youngest should be entrusted entirely to their management, and brought up by hand.

The consequence was such as might have been foreseen.  The child, who was naturally weak and delicate at its birth, daily lost a portion of its little strength, while its continued cries declared the intensity of its sufferings, though they produced no other effect on its unfeeling mother than her having it removed to a more distant apartment, as she could not endure to hear the cross little thing scream so for nothing.  On the other hand, the more favoured twin, who was from its birth a remarkably strong lively infant, and met with all justice from its nurse, throve apace, and was pronounced by her to be the very picture of the bonnie leddie, its mamma, and then, with all the low cunning of her kind, she would launch forth into panegyrics of its beauty, and prophecies of the great dignities and honours that would one day be showered upon it; until, by her fawning and flattery, she succeeded in exciting a degree of interest, which nature had not secured for it in the mother’s breast.

Things were in this situation when, at the end of three weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas arrived to offer their congratulations on the birth of the twins.  Lady Juliana received her sister-in-law in her apartment, which she had not yet quitted, and replied to her congratulations only by querulous complaints and childish murmurs.