Yet he continued, solicitous about their health and comfort, and was even scrupulously careful in his choice of their teachers, books, and the few companions he thought it wise to allow them. Had any one taxed him with not fulfilling to the utmost his duties as a parent, he would have been utterly amazed and indignant; for so one-sided and warped had his whole being become through the one great mistake of his life, that it simply never entered his imagination that, by not loving his children, he was denying to them the first of their natural rights; or that his systematic coldness could possibly be to them an actual injury and injustice. For himself, he came in time to be so absorbed in other interests, those of a political life, as not in the least to miss the affection he had so deliberately stifled in its birth. In a rather narrow way a clever, though never a brilliant man; accurate, painstaking and calm, he gradually became very useful to his party. And thus, contentedly enough, he lived his life, rather congratulating himself than otherwise, on what he had made of it, and on the strength of character which had so thoroughly thrown off and outgrown the bitter disappointment of his early manhood. The childhood and youth of Marion and her brother had not, however, been on the whole desolate or unhappy. Indeed, it takes a great deal, thank God, to crush the happiness out of healthy children I And they don’t miss what they have never known. The first great sorrow was Harry’s going to school; but at the Name period, a kindly disposed and very terrible governess appearing on the scene, Marion’s life was by no means solitary and loveless as she had anticipated. The happiest times they remembered, poor children, were the summer months, Harry’s holidays, which with this kind Miss Jervis, they every year spent in Brentshire, their father’s native county, and where he still owned, near the little village of Bradley, a pretty cottage and a few acres of land—the remains of a once considerable property. In Brentshire, too, at the dull little town of Mallingford, lived the old Aunt Tremlett, Harry’s godmother, from whom they learned the few particulars they ever knew of their pretty young mother and her early death. Their father never accompanied them to Brentshire. He still shrank with a morbid horror from ever revisiting the place where he had first met his wife, and where, so few years after, she was buried.