At home I was the darling of my aunt, the tenderly-beloved of my father,
the pet and plaything of the old domestics, the "young master" of the
farm-labourers, before whom I played many a lordly antic, assuming a sort
of authority which sat oddly enough, I doubt not, on such a baby as I
was.
Gregory was three years older than I. Aunt Fanny was always kind to him
in deed and in action, but she did not often think about him, she had
fallen so completely into the habit of being engrossed by me, from the
fact of my having come into her charge as a delicate baby. My father
never got over his grudging dislike to his stepson, who had so innocently
wrestled with him for the possession of my mother's heart. I mistrust
me, too, that my father always considered him as the cause of my mother's
death and my early delicacy; and utterly unreasonable as this may seem, I
believe my father rather cherished his feeling of alienation to my
brother as a duty, than strove to repress it. Yet not for the world
would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase.
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