Page:Lady Anne Granard 2.pdf/236

234 mice, and considered the degraded sister of their father as a woman following him with a ragged child on her back, a red and yellow handkerchief bound round her head, with a tanned skin, a haggard look, and penniless poverty joined with bitter repentance, being evident in every lineament of her once lovely countenance. "Look at what she was, and think of what she is!" Lady Anne would say, when any one ventured to look on her picture at Granard Park—a picture she chose to leave there, saying, "it was better that her children should never remember that disgrace to her family." Under such circumstances, it was no wonder that their young imaginations depicted their aunt in the form of the only Italians they had happened to meet with—in childhood, the younger had some vague apprehensions, from time to time, of seeing her; and feeling sure that, if she were ever so little a bit like dear papa, speak to her they must; but they outgrew their fears and their memories, and for them she was dead long ere she died. So far as Isabella was concerned, it might have been the apprehension of presentiment, for, in what a questionable shape did this lost aunt, in her fairest representative, appear to the unhappy and bewildered girl?—far easier would it have been to have clasped a wandering vagabond cousin to her pitying heart, than find the blameless and beauteous object of an idolized husband's love in that relation.