your own way. A pearl chain! Hoot, hoot, what wants such a little chit as you with a pearl chain? You love pretty things, ay, so do we all, and that's why you get your every one." own way with 106 CHAPTER IX. "My friend! enough to sorrow you have given, OUR father educated us himself-we understood that our great-grandfather had exacted this promise from him. We had a drawing-master and a dancing-mistress twice a week from Rudchester, the nearest town. Music he understood perfectly himself, but Pamela was the only one who cared much for it. My sisters were twins, now nearly twenty years of age, but there was no family excitement about their resemblance to each other. They were unlike even for sisters. Mabel was fair-haired, blue-eyed, and spirited. She was the eldest, at least so considered. Pamela was quiet, perhaps a little indolent, dark-haired, with eyes of a misty blackness, that gave them a look of peculiar softness. They were fringed with very long lashes, which seemed to spring out of a dark rim. They had both tall flexible figures, and pretty hands and feet. When Pamela was excited, and the colour rose in her face, and a brightness into her eyes, she was wonderfully pretty; but Mabel's face was beautiful, though of a serene gravity; if merriment came there it passed like a light cloud over the bosom of ocean. Her expression was too fine to be merry. Yet it was hopeful, and therefore always gladdening. One thing my sisters appeared to possess in common. Their voices were so alike it was impossible even for the sensitive ear of our father to distinguish one from the other, to which a slight lisp gave a more marked peculiarity. I must try to recall my father, as he stood there gazing on the flowers, with their blooms nestling against the great oak staircase. Tall, but very thin, bent as if by sorrow more than age, for he was but forty-five, if so much. White hair, fine, like silk, curling backwards, leaving bare, as if cut out of marble, a delicate profile, in which the only colour visible was pink in the transparent nostril, with the same hue a little fainter on the lips. Grey, clear eyes, that looked so pure, so cold, yet bright, they did not appear to be eyes, but rather gems, polished and rounded with exquisite art. He leant upon a stick, as if the weight of his fragile form required the support, and the long white delicate fingers nervously moved with convulsive twitches on the handle. His expression was habitually one of pain, unless excited by anything we said or did, and then he would stand erect. Life would illumine the cold eyes, a colour rise and fall on the pale cheek, and he looked a gallant man, heroic through suffering, ennobled by learning. It may be imagined that the family sin of exclusiveness or nervous shyness, flourished to its utmost limits in our childhood, and with reason. Our father, at all times a delicate, somewhat fanciful pedant, as he must be called, loved his books, and disliked society. And in his present circumstances there was every inducement to make him cling still more to the one, and nothing to allure him to seek the other. He seemed painfully conscious that when circumstances, as they necessarily did, called him into contact with others, it was as little to their liking as his own. we had never left our home, which, matchless in its situation, beauty, and luxuries, provided us with every source of enjoyment. And it is probable, had we made the experiment of going out into the world, we should only have turned to our home the more Thus |