Whether Miss Gass repented her marriage, her brothers had no means of learning: for she, retaining her anger, never wrote to them during her husband's lifetime. It was a very short one. Barely a twelvemonth had elapsed after the knot was tied, when there came a pitiful letter from her. Captain Rane had died, just as her little son Oliver (named after a friend, she said) was born. Thomas Gass, to whom the letter had been specially written, gathered that she was left badly off; though she did not absolutely say so. He went into one of his angry moods, and tossed the epistle across the desk to his partner. "You must do something for her, Gass," said John North when he had read it. "I never will," hotly affirmed Mr. Gass. "Fanny knows what I promised if she married Rane--that I would never help her during my lifetime or after it. She knows another thing--that I am not one to go from my word. William may help her if he likes; he has not much to give away, but he can have her home to live with him." "Help the child, then," suggested Mr. North, knowing further remonstrance to be useless. "No," returned obstinate Thomas Gass; "I'll stick to the spirit of my promise as well as the letter." And Mr. North bent his head again--he was going over some estimates--feeling that the affair was none of his. "I don't mind putting the boy in the tontine, North," presently spoke the junior partner. "The tontine!" echoed John North in surprise, "what tontine?" "What tontine?" returned the hard man--though in truth he was not hard in general, "why, the one that you and others are getting up; the one you have just put your baby, Bessy, into; I know of no other tontine." "But that will not benefit the boy," urged Mr. North: "certainly not now; and the chances are ten to one against its ever benefiting him in the future." "Never mind; I'll put him into it," said Mr. Gass, whose obstinacy always came out well under opposition. "You want a tenth child to close the list, and I'll put him into it." So into the tontine Oliver Rane, unconscious infant, was put. But Mrs. Rane did not further trouble either of her brothers; or, as things turned out, require assistance from them. She remained in India; and after a year married a Government chaplain there, the Reverend George Cumberland, who possessed some private property. Little, if any, communication took place afterwards between her and her brothers; she cherished resentment for old grievances, and would not write to them. And so the sister and the brothers seemed to fade away from each other from henceforth. We all know how relatives, parted by time and distance, become estranged, disappearing almost from memory.