“Poor darling! she seems but a child herself.”
“My age—five and twenty,” returned Rachel. “Well I shall go and ask about the house. Remember, mother, this influx is to bring no trouble or care on you; Fanny Temple is my charge from henceforth. My mission has come to seek me,” she added as she quitted the room, in eager excitement of affection, emotion, and importance, for Fanny had been more like a sister than a cousin.
Grace and Rachel Curtis were the daughters of the squire of the Homestead; Fanny, of his brother, an officer in the army. Left at home for education, the little girl had spent her life, from her seventh to her sixteenth year, as absolutely one with her cousins, until she was summoned to meet her father at the Cape, under the escort of his old friend, General Sir Stephen Temple. She found Colonel Curtis sinking under fatal disease, and while his relations were preparing to receive, almost to maintain, his widow and daughter, they were electrified by the tidings that the gentle little Fanny, at sixteen, had become the wife of Sir Stephen Temple, at sixty.
From that time little had been known about her; her mother had continued with her, but the two Mrs. Curtises had never been congenial or intimate; and Fanny was never a full nor willing correspondent, feeling perhaps the difficulty of writing under changed circumstances. Her husband had been in various commands in the colonies, without returning to England; and all that was known of her was a general impression that she had much ill-health and numerous children, and was tended like an infant by her bustling mother and doting husband. More than half a year back, tidings had come of the almost sudden death of her mother; and about three months subsequently, one of the officers of Sir Stephen’s staff had written to announce that the good old general had been killed by a fall from his horse, while on a round of inspection at a distance from home. The widow was then completely prostrated by the shock, but promised to write as soon as she was able, and this was the fulfilment of that promise, bringing the assurance that Fanny was coming back with her little ones to the home of her childhood.
Of that home, Grace and Rachel were the joint-heiresses, though it was owned by the mother for her life. It was an estate of farm and moorland, worth some three or four thousand a year, and the house was perched on a beautiful promontory, running out into the sea, and inclosing one side of a bay, where a small fishing-village had recently expanded into a quiet watering-place, esteemed by some for its remoteness from railways, and for the calm and simplicity that were yearly diminished by its increasing popularity. It was the family fashion to look down from their crag at the new esplanade with pity and contempt for the ruined loneliness of the pebbly beach; and as Mrs. Curtis had not health to go often into society, she had been the more careful