Such characters marry hastily and improvidently. Carew's wife died when her first child was born, a handsome little rogue, who grew to man's estate the very counterpart in person and disposition of his graceless sire. He, too, married early and in defiance of prudential considerations, gambled, drank, quarrelled with his father, and lost his life in a duel before they had made friends. Old Carew's hair turned grey, and his proud form began to stoop soon after his son's death, for he loved the boy dearly, none the less perhaps because of those very qualities he thought it right to reprove. Then he took the widow and her little girl to live with him at a small freehold he inherited near Porlock; but young Mistress Carew did not long survive her husband, and the old man found himself at threescore years and ten the sole companion of a demure little damsel not yet in her teens, whose every look, word, and gesture reminded him cruelly of the son he had loved and lost.
These two became inseparable. The child's mother had imparted to her a few simple accomplishments--needlework, house-keeping, a little singing, a little music, the French language--as she had herself acquired it in a convent abroad; above all, those womanly ways that not one woman in ten really possesses, and that make the charm of what is called society no less than the happiness of home.
Little Nelly was still in her black frock when, taking a Sunday walk hand-in-hand with her grandfather, she looked up in his face, and thus accosted him:--
"When I'm big," said she, "I'll have a little girl of my own. I shall take her out-a-walking, and be kind to her, as you are to me. You won't like her better than me, grandfather, will you?"
"You may be sure of that, Nelly," was his answer, while he marvelled how this blue-eyed mite had come to be dearer to him than all his loves and memories of the past; wishing he could have shaped his whole life differently for her sake.
"I shall always be your little girl, grandfather," continued Nelly; "I couldn't do without _you_, and you couldn't do without _me_, so you need not be afraid of my ever going away to leave you--I promise--there!"
"But, if you marry, Nelly?" said he, laughing, for to his little maid this affirmation was the most solemn form of oath.