CHAPTER XXVI.
LEOPOLD'S STORY.
While yet a mere boy, scarcely more than sixteen, Leopold had made
acquaintance with the family of a certain manufacturer, who, having
retired from business with a rapidly-gained fortune, had some years
before purchased an estate a few miles from Goldswyre, his uncle's
place. Their settling in the neighbourhood was not welcome to the
old-fashioned, long-rooted family of the Lingards; but although they
had not called upon them, they could not help meeting them
occasionally. Leopold's association with them commenced just after
he had left Eton, between which time and his going up to Cambridge
he spent a year in reading with his cousins' tutor. It was at a ball
he first saw Emmeline, the eldest of the family. She had but lately
returned from a school at which from the first she had had for her
bedfellow a black ewe. It was not a place where any blackness under
that of pitch was likely to attract notice, being one of those very
ordinary and very common schools where everything is done that is
done, first for manners, then for accomplishments, and lastly for
information, leaving all the higher faculties and endowments of the
human being as entirely unconsidered as if they had no existence.
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