Clarissa has eloped! With a young man called George Harrington, the one I told you about. She was flirting quite shamelessly with him at the Beauchamps’, but I never dreamt that anything would come of it—I thought she had resigned herself to marrying that horrid dried-up Mr. Ingram—but I must try...
She died of scarlatina, soon after her second birthday, when I was five years old. I remember only fragments from the time before she died: Mama dancing Alma on her knee, and singing as she would never do again; reading my primer aloud to Mama while she rocked Alma’s cradle with her foot; walking...
Indeed it had been hastening—with one disagreeable exception, as we shall presently learn—almost from the moment of his birth some forty years before the afternoon upon which we find him gazing at a blank space on the wall of his private gallery. Though the main entrance hall and staircase of his...