"You say that your mother is dead?" she resumed.
"She has been dead about five years. We are three of us: I; my brother Thomas, who was born two years after me; and my sister, Mary Augusta, who is several years younger. There were two other girls between my brother and Mary, but they died."
"Mr. Carr is in business in Rotterdam?"
"Yes; partner in a merchant's house there. He has saved money, and is well off."
Mrs. Dundyke faintly smiled; she was glad for a moment to make a semblance of forgetting her own woes. "Those random young men often make the most sober ones when they settle down. Your father was wild in his young days."
"Was he? I'm sure I don't know. You should see him now: a regular steady-going old Dutchman, fat and taciturn, who smokes his afternoons away in the summer-house. He has not been very well of late years; and I tell him he ought to spend his hours of recreation in taking exercise, not in sitting still and smoking."
"Does he keep up any intercourse with his relatives in Westerbury?" asked Mrs. Dundyke, for she had heard through Mildred Arkell that Westerbury never heard anything of its renegade son, Robert Carr, and did not know or care whether he was dead or alive—in fact, had forgotten all remembrance of him.
"Not any—not the least. I fancy my father and mother must have had some disagreement with their home friends, for they never spoke of them. I remember, when I was a little boy, my mother getting news of the death of a sister; but how it came to her I'm sure I don't know."
"She had two sisters, and she had a brother," said Mrs. Dundyke. "I heard that Mary died. Are the other sister and the brother living?"