His brother, William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a selfishness the most pitiful.  He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the south.  He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious entertainment—­lodge his guest in the style of a prince for weeks together, nor exhibit a feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion in the mind of his inmate.  In public, the populace had no complaints to urge of his penuriousness; and in all outward shows he manifested the same general characteristics which marked the habit of the class to which he belonged.

But his selfishness lay in things not so much on the surface.  It was more deep and abiding in its character; and consisted in the false estimate which he made of the things around him.  He had learned to value wealth as a substitute for mind—­for morals—­for all that is lofty, and all that should be leading, in the consideration of society.  He valued few things beside.  He had different emotions for the rich from those which he entertained for the poor; and, from perceiving that among men, money could usurp all places—­could defeat virtue, command respect denied to morality and truth, and secure a real worship when the Deity must be content with shows and symbols—­he gradually gave it the chief place in his regard.  He valued wealth as the instrument of authority.  It secured him power; a power, however, which he had no care to employ, and which he valued only as tributary to the maintenance of that haughty ascendency over men which was his heart’s first passion.  He was neither miser nor mercenary; he did not labor to accumulate—­perhaps because he was a lucky accumulator without any painstaking of his own:  but he was, by nature an aristocrat, and not unwilling to compel respect through the means of money, as through any other more noble agency of intellect or morals.

There was only one respect in which a likeness between the fortunes of the two brothers might be found to exist.  After a grateful union of a few years, they had both lost their wives.  A single child, in the case of each, had preserved and hallowed to them the memories of their mothers.  To the younger brother Ralph, a son had been born, soothing the sorrows of the exile, and somewhat compensating his loss.  To William Colleton, the elder brother, his wife had left a single and very lovely daughter, the sweet and beautiful Edith, a girl but a few months younger than her cousin Ralph.  It was the redeeming feature, in the case of the surviving parents, that they each gave to their motherless children, the whole of that affection—­warm in both cases—­which had been enjoyed by the departed mothers.