"I was born at Dupley Walls, the youngest of three children. My brother Charles, who died in India at the age of twenty, was two years older, and my sister Eudoxia, who died when she was fourteen, was six years older than me. When I was three years old I was sent for by my father's half-sister, a rich maiden lady who lived at Beckley in Cumberland. It was understood that I was to be regarded as her adopted child, and that some day the great bulk of her fortune would come to me. Of my father I remember next to nothing. I never saw him again after going to live at Beckley. I have been told, and I have reason to believe it true, that he disliked me, and was glad to be rid of me for ever. In this respect my sister fared worse than I did. My father disliked her almost as much as he disliked me, but poor Eudoxia had no rich aunt to release her from a tyranny that was driving her slowly into the grave. "My father, Sir John Pollexfen, was a man of strong passions; cruel and unbending to a degree where he could be so with impunity. He and my mother were ill-matched. Knowing as you do, what Lady Pollexfen is now, how proud, stern, and unyielding, with yet occasional capricious fits of kindness and generous feeling, you will readily understand how her married life was one of perpetual discord and soul-fretting unhappiness. At length she and my father separated in consequence of a disagreement respecting my brother, and they never saw each other again till my father lay dying. He carried his dislike of my mother beyond the grave, in ordering that his body should be kept unburied for twenty years; that it should remain under whatever roof my mother might choose to make her permanent residence during that time; and that my mother should visit it in person at least once a week during the whole period of twenty years, should her life be spared for so long a time. "In the seclusion of Beckley the items of news that reached us from Dupley Walls were few and far between. I had never been encouraged to write to either of my parents, and neither of them ever thought of writing to me. A coldly-worded letter once every six months from my aunt to her brother, and an equally cold reply a month or two afterwards, were the sole links that bound me to those I would fain have loved but could not. At the age of seventeen I knew or remembered little more of my parents than I should have done had they died on the day I left Dupley Walls. Had they really been dead I should have cherished their memory, and thought tenderly of them; but since they were alive, their cold neglect chilled me to the heart, and withered every flower of love that ought to have flourished there.