Indeed, Agneta had seen as little of her uncle and aunt as was compatible with their relations. She had spent nearly the whole of her short life in schoolrooms, within the confines of a park and a few neighbouring lanes, or in the narrower bounds of West-end squares and gardens—on marine parades, or occasionally for a change on the promenades of foreign watering places. She had been largely consigned to the companionship of an unexceptionable elderly governess, who had become a martinet, with the most of any originality or spirit she had ever possessed pressed out of her by the exigencies of a long and toilsome professional career. It was little wonder that Miss Dennison, though she was all that her certificates proclaimed her and Mrs. Stanhope’s fancy painted her, as a well-born, well-bred, well-principled woman, whose solid education had not been entirely neglected, while her French accent was that of a native, and her music and drawing those of an accomplished amateur, proved still not a congenial companion for a girl whose heart was stirring and fluttering with the ardent impulses of that spring-time, which when repressed into a walk is all the readier the next moment to break out in a gallop. Indeed Miss Dennison was chiefly concerned—so far as the duties of her office would allow—with securing the ease and rest which she had laboriously earned. It happened also that there were few contemporary young people among those branches of Agneta Stanhope’s father’s and mother’s families, the heads of which troubled themselves, amidst the distractions of modern life, to remember her existence and send her invitations to spend some of her holidays in their circles. Beyond her family connections, there was an embargo laid by Mrs. Stanhope, and especially by Miss Dennison, in her increasing scrupulousness and dislike to interruptions of her routine, on juvenile friends for Agneta, beyond a very select few, until the girl grew up with hardly a playfellow or intimate companion save her brothers, who had only been with her at brief intervals, separated by long spaces of time. The visits of Harry and Horry at the General’s had been the bright spots in Agneta’s life which had aroused the young humanity in her and kept it from stagnation. To Harry especially she had owed the greatest enjoyments in keeping with her years which she had ever known. Harry, a manly little fellow from childhood, had always been rather fond and proud of his younger sister, and had shown himself as careful of her, and indulgent to her, as could be expected from his habitual thoughtlessness, though he had never dreamt of ranking her with Horry in his regard, or supposing that he owed to her the same allegiance. He and Horry had never been sundered. Horry was in a measure necessary to Harry, as Harry was to Horry, while Agneta had merely proved a pet and play-thing now and then, and, after all, was but a girl, who belonged by rights to Aunt Julia and the General—not to the lads.