A DREAM OF LOVE.
A STORY IN TWO PARTS.
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PART I.
“Amyce!”
My Grand Uncle interrupted me in the concluding paragraph of the Parliamentary debate which I had been reading aloud to him for the last hour; “Amyce, tell Butterworth to have the Alcove room prepared for to-morrow—I expect company.”
Never before in my short life had such a direction been given to me, and I dropped the “Times” in astonishment, and glanced inquiringly up in the old man’s face. If I had not stood in habitual awe of him, I should have poured forth a throng of eager questions.
We were sitting together in the old library at Cloyse Towers; my great uncle, Sir John Cloyse, a shrivelled, yellow-skinned old man, with prominent features and beady black eyes, crouching into the corner of the old-fashioned, high-backed chair which stood close to the fender: and I,—a sandy-haired girl, whose pallid face and grey eyes laid little claim to admiration,—only separated from him by a small round table on which rested a pair of ponderous silver candlesticks.
I had been brought up at Cloyse Towers, and I was reputed to be its heiress. My great uncle had voluntarily adopted me when, a puling, miserable infant, I was sent home from India on my parent’s death. In childhood I had been submitted to the guardianship of old Mrs. Butterworth, the housekeeper, a trusty, kind-hearted dame, who had been for many years at the head of the establishment, and even older than my uncle, was wont to regard him with a maternal affection that was often ludicrous and sometimes touching. She was a good old soul, blithe as a lark, and, despite her fourscore years, as active as a young girl. I believe she loved me better than all the world beside, saving and excepting her master, and to him she was literally devoted.
He was a strange man,—shy, reserved, gloomy, misanthropical, and, since of late years he had been incapacitated by severe attacks of rheumatic gout, subject to fits of nervous irritability which were peculiarly distressing to himself and all around him. I scarcely know how I should have endured life in that melancholy old house, and subjected to so many depressing influences, had it not been for the sunny disposition of Nurse Butterworth. She could not indeed entirely remove the clouds which separated me from my uncle, but she lightened them, over and over again, by recitals of his love and affection for me—love and affection felt, she said, for he was not a man to show warm feelings to any one, and I am sure she kept up his interest in me by sedulously