‘But I am born,’ I said with firmness, ‘I, To walk another way than his, dear aunt.’ ‘You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen months Will walk as well as you,’ she cried in haste, ‘Without a steadying finger. Why, you child, God help you, you are groping in the dark, For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps, That you, sole offspring of an opulent man, Are rich and free to choose a way to walk? You think, and it’s a reasonable thought, That I besides, being well to do in life, Will leave my handful in my niece’s hand When death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray, Pray, child,—albeit I know you love me not,— As if you loved me, that I may not die! For when I die and leave you, out you go, (Unless I make room for you in my grave) Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother’s lamb, (Ah heaven,—that pains!)—without a right to crop A single blade of grass beneath these trees, Or cast a lamb’s small shadow on the lawn, Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here’s The fruit you planted in your foreign loves!— Ay, there’s the fruit he planted! never look Astonished at me with your mother’s eyes, For it was they, who set you where you are, An undowered orphan. Child, your father’s choice Of that said mother, disinherited His daughter, his and hers. Men do not think Of sons and daughters, when they fall in love, So much more than of sisters; otherwise, He would have paused to ponder what he did, And shrunk before that clause in the entail Excluding offspring by a foreign wife, (The clause set up a hundred years ago By a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girl And had his heart danced over in return); But this man shrunk at nothing, never thought Of you, Aurora, any more than me— Your mother must have been a pretty thing, For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns, To make a good man, which my brother was, Unchary of the duties to his house; But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane, Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wrote Directly on your birth, to Italy, ‘I ask your baby daughter for my son In whom the entail now merges by the law. Betroth her to us out of love, instead Of colder reasons, and she shall not lose By love or law from henceforth’—so he wrote; A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane. Remember how he drew you to his knee The year you came here, just before he died, And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks, And wished them redder,—you remember Vane? And now his son who represents our house And holds the fiefs and manors in his place, To whom reverts my pittance when I die, (Except a few books and a pair of shawls) The boy is generous like him, and prepared To carry out his kindest word and thought To you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young man Is Romney Leigh; although the sun of youth