I only mention this simple incident, because it is necessary, before I proceed to the eventful part of my narrative, that you should know exactly in what relation the sisters stood toward one another from the first.  Of all the last parting words that Mrs. Welwyn had spoken to her child, none had been oftener repeated, none more solemnly urged, than those which had commended the little Rosamond to Ida’s love and care.  To other persons, the full, the all-trusting dependence which the dying mother was known to have placed in a child hardly eleven years old, seemed merely a proof of that helpless desire to cling even to the feeblest consolations, which the approach of death so often brings with it.  But the event showed that the trust so strangely placed had not been ventured vainly when it was committed to young and tender hands.  The whole future existence of the child was one noble proof that she had been worthy of her mother’s dying confidence, when it was first reposed in her.  In that simple incident which I have just mentioned the new life of the two motherless sisters was all foreshadowed.

Time passed.  I left school—­went to college—­traveled in Germany, and stayed there some time to learn the language.  At every interval when I came home, and asked about the Welwyns, the answer was, in substance, almost always the same.  Mr. Welwyn was giving his regular dinners, performing his regular duties as a county magistrate, enjoying his regular recreations as an a amateur farmer and an eager sportsman.  His two daughters were never separate.  Ida was the same strange, quiet, retiring girl, that she had always been; and was still (as the phrase went) “spoiling” Rosamond in every way in which it was possible for an elder sister to spoil a younger by too much kindness.

I myself went to the Grange occasionally, when I was in this neighborhood, in holiday and vacation time; and was able to test the correctness of the picture of life there which had been drawn for me.  I remember the two sisters, when Rosamond was four or five years old; and when Ida seemed to me, even then, to be more like the child’s mother than her sister.  She bore with her little caprices as sisters do not bear with one another.  She was so patient at lesson-time, so anxious to conceal any weariness that might overcome her in play hours, so proud when Rosamond’s beauty was noticed, so grateful for Rosamond’s kisses when the child thought of bestowing them, so quick to notice all that Rosamond did, and to attend to all that Rosamond said, even when visitors were in the room, that she seemed, to my boyish observation, altogether different from other elder sisters in other family circles into which I was then received.