Finally, he returned to his chair, cut the cords of the packet, broke the seal, and read as follows:
“THE STORY OF A WITHERED HEART
“You have often heard how lonely, loveless and neglected was my childhood and youth. You are reminded of these facts now, not in excuse of what followed, but as the causes of the effects that destroyed my life.
“You know that I was born at Enderby Castle, where the first years of my infancy passed.
“When I was scarcely four years of age I lost my mother—too young to understand or to lament my loss. The pageantry of her funeral is one of the strongest impressions among the brain pictures of that time.
“A few days after that event my father left Enderby, taking me with him.
“We went to Weirdwaste, an estate he had acquired through his marriage with my mother, situated on the west coast of Ireland. It was, if possible, even more drear, lonely and desolate than Enderby Cliff itself.
“This place, in which I was destined to pass my childhood, was built of gray stone, two stories high, around the four sides of a hollow quadrangle, at the inland end of a long, flat point of land stretching far out into the Atlantic Ocean, which at high tide swept over it, covering more than two-thirds of the ground; and the moan of the sea never ceased from the sorrowful shore. North, west and south around the point of land nothing but sky and water was to be seen. East—inland—was a wild waste, dotted here and there by the huts of the poorest peasantry on the island, and that means, also, the poorest people on the earth.
“The old manor house was shockingly out of repair, but because it was the best building on the estate it was occupied by my father’s land steward, O’Nally, and his wife.
“These two had been old servants of my mother’s family, and had been very much devoted to her.