A lonely child, I ripened into a lonely lad, and so passed my life, until the coming of Ruth Wylie, an event which fully deserves a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER II.
RUTH WYLIE.
Love occasioned my first scrape in life, and thus it came to pass.
About the period of my aimless existence, detailed in the last chapter, the mansion of Mr. Nathan Wylie received a new, and to him, in no way welcome inmate, in the person of an orphan niece from London, the daughter of a brother who had died in circumstances the reverse of affluent, bequeathing this daughter—then in her sixteenth year—to his care.
This brother's letter—one penned on his death-bed in an agony of anxiety for the future of his orphan Ruth—was deeply touching in its simple tenor; and some of the references therein to years that had long passed away, and to the pleasant days of their boyhood, should have been more than enough to soften even the heart of Nathan Wylie; but he read it unmoved, with a grimace on his thin mouth and his beetle brows knit.
Then he carefully folded and docketed it among others, with a gleam of irritation in his cat-like eyes; and equally unmoved by sympathy or compassion did he receive his charge, when she arrived by the stagecoach from London, pale with sorrow, weary with travel, and clad in cheap and simple mourning for the father she had lost.
One generally imagines a Ruth to be solemn, demure, and quiet—something between a little nun and a Quakeress; but Ruth Wylie sorely belied her name, being a merry, kind, and affectionate girl, with bewitching dark eyes, full of fun and waggery, especially when uncle Nathan was absent, for she failed to conceal that his hard, short, and dry manner, and his cold, immoveable visage chilled and saddened her.
New and strange thoughts came into my mind now; and soon I conceived a regard for Ruth, notwithstanding her hideous relation, the lawyer; for to me old Nathan was a bugbear—an ogre!
Despite his angry and reiterated injunctions, she frequently brought her workbasket or book into the room where we plodded with our pens, day after day, for she loved companionship, and Nathan's churlish old housekeeper bored her.