“My brother, sir, is a strange being—­a creature of whims and caprices.  There is nothing fixed or settled in his opinions or conduct.  His inviting you to spend the summer with us was a whim:  one that has astonished several who have not hesitated to express it.  It is as likely on his return from his river place, that he will devour you with kindness as that he will meet you with the coldness he has manifested for some days.  Do not let your conduct be influenced by his whims.”

“Miss Alice, I am suspicious, perhaps, by nature.  I have thought that you have avoided me lately.  I have been very lonesome at times.”

Alice lifted her bonnet from her head, and was swinging it by the strings as she walked along for a few steps, when she stopped, and, turning to her companion, said with a firm though timid voice:  “I cannot be deceitful.  You have properly guessed:  I have avoided you.  It was on your account as well as my own.  My self-respect is in conflict with my respect for you.  I need not tell you why I avoided you; but I will—­conscious that I am speaking to a gentleman who will appreciate my motives and preserve inviolate my communications.  You saw my cousin hurry away from here.  She came to remain some weeks.  The cause of her going was my brother.  From some strange, unaccountable cause he became offended with her, and charged her with giving bad advice to me.  What she has said to me as advice since she came was in the privacy of my bedroom, and in such tones that had he or another been in the chamber they could not have overheard it.  I know, sir, and in shame do I speak it, that I am under the surveillance of the servants, who report to my brother and my sister my every act and every word; and I know, too, my brother’s imagination supplies in many instances these reports.  Why I am thus watched I know not.

“My brother is my guardian, and nature and duty, it would seem, should prompt him to guard my happiness as well as my interest; but I know in the one instance he fails, and I fear in the other I am suffering.  All my family fear him, and none of them love me.  I am my parents’ youngest child.  Oh, sir!  England is not the only country where it is a curse to be a younger child.  My father died when I was an infant.  My mother was affectionate and indulgent; my sisters were harsh and tyrannical, and in very early girlhood taught me to hate them.  My mother was made miserable by their treatment of me; and my brother, too, quarrelled with her because she would not subject me to the servility of the discipline he prescribed.  This quarrel ripened into hate, and he never came to the house or spoke to my mother for years.

“The day before she died, and when her recovery was thought to be impossible, he came with a prepared will and witnesses, which in their presence he almost forced her to sign:  in this will I was greatly wronged, and this brother has tauntingly told me the cause of this was my being the means of prejudicing our mother against him.