It was generally supposed (and I have no doubt correctly) that she found her great happiness and her great consolation in her little girl Ida—­now the lady from whom we have just parted.  The child took after her mother from the first—­inheriting her mother’s fondness for books, her mother’s love of music, her mother’s quick sensibilities, and, more than all, her mother’s quiet firmness, patience, and loving kindness of disposition.  From Ida’s earliest years, Mrs. Welwyn undertook the whole superintendence of her education.  The two were hardly ever apart, within doors or without.  Neighbors and friends said that the little girl was being brought up too fancifully, and was not enough among other children, was sadly neglected as to all reasonable and practical teaching, and was perilously encouraged in those dreamy and imaginative tendencies of which she had naturally more than her due share.  There was, perhaps, some truth in this; and there might have been still more, if Ida had possessed an ordinary character, or had been reserved for an ordinary destiny.  But she was a strange child from the first, and a strange future was in store for her.

Little Ida reached her eleventh year without either brother or sister to be her playfellow and companion at home.  Immediately after that period, however, her sister Rosamond was born.  Though Mr. Welwyn’s own desire was to have had a son, there were, nevertheless, great rejoicings yonder in the old house on the birth of this second daughter.  But they were all turned, only a few months afterward, to the bitterest grief and despair:  the Grange lost its mistress.  While Rosamond was still an infant in arms, her mother died.

Mrs. Welwyn had been afflicted with some disorder after the birth of her second child, the name of which I am not learned enough in medical science to be able to remember.  I only know that she recovered from it, to all appearance, in an unexpectedly short time; that she suffered a fatal relapse, and that she died a lingering and a painful death.  Mr. Welwyn (who, in after years, had a habit of vaingloriously describing his marriage as “a love-match on both sides”) was really fond of his wife in his own frivolous, feeble way, and suffered as acutely as such a man could suffer, during the latter days of her illness, and at the terrible time when the doctors, one and all, confessed that her life was a thing to be despaired of.  He burst into irrepressible passions of tears, and was always obliged to leave the sick-room whenever Mrs. Welwyn spoke of her approaching end.  The last solemn words of the dying woman, the tenderest messages that she could give, the dearest parting wishes that she could express, the most earnest commands that she could leave behind her, the gentlest reasons for consolation that she could suggest to the survivors among those who loved her, were not poured into her husband’s ear, but into her child’s.  From the first period of her illness, Ida had persisted