“Never met him; but I believe I knew him better than many who were his daily intimates: for years my nephew's letters were journals of their joint lives--they seemed never separate. But you shall read them yourself. They go back to the time when they both landed at Calcutta, young and ardent spirits, eager for adventure, and urged by a bold ambition to win distinction. From that day they were inseparable. They hunted, travelled, lived together; and so attached had they become to each other, that George writes in one letter: 'They have offered me an appointment on the staff, but as this would separate me from Ormsby, it is not to be thought of.' It was to me George always wrote, for my brother never liked letter-writing, and thus I was my nephew's confidante, and intrusted with all his secrets. Nor was there one in which your father's name did not figure. It was, how Ormsby got him out of this scrape, or took his duty for him, or made this explanation, or raised that sum of money, that filled all these. At last--I never knew why or how--George ceased to write to me, and addressed all his letters to his father, marked 'Strictly private' too, so that I never saw what they contained. My brother, I believe, suffered deeply from the concealment, and there must have been what to him seemed a sufficient reason for it, or he would never have excluded me from that share in his confidence I had always possessed. At all events, it led to a sort of estrangement between us,--the only one of our lives. He would tell me at intervals that George was on leave; George was at the Hills; he was expecting his troop; he had been sent here or there; but nothing more, till one morning, as if unable to bear the burden longer, he said, 'George has made up his mind to leave his regiment and take service with one of the native princes. It is an arrangement sanctioned by the Government, but it is one I grieve over and regret greatly.' I asked eagerly to hear further about this step, but he said he knew nothing beyond the bare fact. I then said, 'What does his friend Conyers think of it?' and my brother dryly replied, 'I am not aware that he has been consulted.' Our own misfortunes were fast closing around us, so that really we had little time to think of anything but the difficulties that each day brought forth. George's letters grew rarer and rarer; rumors of him reached us; stories of his gorgeous mode of living, his princely state and splendid retinue, of the high favor he enjoyed with the Rajah, and the influence he wielded over neighboring chiefs; and then we heard, still only by rumor, that he had married a native princess, who had some time before been converted to Christianity. The first intimation of the fact from himself came, when, announcing that he had sent his daughter, a child of about five years old, to Europe to be educated--” She paused here, and seemed to have fallen into a revery over the past; when Conyers suddenly asked,--