. . . Yes, I know it sounds
like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing
happened. . . . Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic
portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were
living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's
duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted
Princess across the seas to Yorkshire: where in due course she bore
him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who
eventually came into the property but doesn't come into the story.
In the meantime it had happened that _I_ saw the light. . . .
My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my
father married again. My sister Sally--the recipient of those long
letters you see me inditing o' nights--is my step-sister, and an
adored one at that.
There you have the family history, or enough of it. The old
friendship between my father and Squire Denistoun had never been
broken; and now that death had taken away the last excuse for a
rivalry which had been felt but to be renounced, Constantia and I--
unconscious brats--shared holidays, as it chanced at my home or hers,
in nefarious poaching beside Avon or in gallops between her northern
moors and the sea.
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