By EVELYN EVERETT-GREEN, Author of “Greyfriars,” “Half-a-dozen Sisters,” etc.
CHAPTER I.
BROTHER AND SISTER.
call it cruel of them to separate us! They might at least have let us be together!” cried Sheila, with tears in her voice, if not in her eyes.
“Well, but we shall not be very far apart. We can see each other most days, and you will have a nice home with Uncle and Aunt Cossart—more what you have been used to—a big country house. Uncle Tom lives in the town to be near the works; but he says it is an easy walk to get out to Cossart Place.”
Sheila gave a rather scornful toss to her handsome head.
“Cossart Place! I hate that pretentious way of calling one’s house by one’s own name! Oscar, aren’t these relations of ours rather vulgar, purse-proud people? Papa must have had some reason for keeping us away from them all these years.”
Oscar was silent for a few moments, and then he said slowly—
“You know, Sheila, our father was rather a proud man. He thought a good deal of birth and family, and of being one of the Cholmondeleys of Warwickshire. He married our beautiful mother for love; but he took her right away from her family—he told me so himself as he lay dying—and she never saw any of them again. She had only quite a small fortune then. The Cossarts have got rich since her marriage. But our father’s property has been dwindling and dwindling, and he has dipped again and again into capital, and everything is mortgaged up to the hilt, as Mr. Dart calls it. Sheila, I am afraid there will be very little left for us except the little fortune of our mother’s, which was settled upon her and her children.”