CHAPTER I. THE ARGHOUSE INHERITANCE.

One of the children brought me a photograph album, long ago finished and closed, and showed me a faded and blurred figure over which there had been a little dispute.  Was it Hercules with club and lion-skin, or was it a gentleman I had known?

Ah me! how soon a man’s place knoweth him no more!  What fresh recollections that majestic form awoke in me—­the massive features, with the steadfast eye, and low, square brow, curled over with short rings of hair; the mouth, that, through the thick, short beard, still invited trust and reliance, even while there was a look of fire and determination that inspired dread.

The thing seemed to us hideous and absurd when it was taken by Miss Horsman.  I hated it, and hid it away as a caricature.  But now those pale, vanishing tints bring the very presence before me; and before the remembrance can become equally obscure in my own mind, let me record for others the years that I spent with my young Alcides as he now stands before me in memory.

Our family history is a strange one.  I, Lucy Alison, never even saw my twin brothers—­nor, indeed, knew of their existence—­during my childhood.  I had one brother a year younger than myself, and as long as he lived he was treated as the eldest son, and neither he nor I ever dreamed that my father had had a first wife and two sons.  He was a feeble, broken man, who seemed to my young fancy so old that in after times it was always a shock to me to read on his tablet, “Percy Alison, aged fifty-seven;” and I was but seven years old when he died under the final blow of the loss of my little brother Percy from measles.

The dear old place—­house with five gables on the garden front, black timbered, and with white plaster between, and oh! such flowers in the garden—­was left to my mother for her life; and she was a great deal younger than my father, so we went on living there, and it was only when I was almost a woman that I came to the knowledge that the property would never be mine, but would go in the male line to the son of one of my disinherited convict brothers.

The story, as my mother knew it, was this:  Their names were Ambrose and Eustace:  there was very little interval between their births, and there had been some confusion between them during the first few hours of their lives, so that the question of seniority was never entirely clear, though Ambrose was so completely the leader and master that he was always looked upon as the elder.