The parties were fairly quits, and there was no love lost between them.
They saw each other but seldom, and, when the surviving brother took up
his abode in the _new purchase_, as the Indian acquisitions of modern
times have been usually styled, he was lost sight of, for a time,
entirely, by his more staid and worthy kinsman.
Still, Edgar Munro did not look upon his brother as utterly bad. A wild
indifference to social forms, and those staid customs which in the
estimation of society become virtues, was, in his idea, the most serious
error of which Walter had been guilty. In this thought he persisted to
the last, and did not so much feel the privations to which his death
must subject his child, in the belief and hope that his brother would
not only be able but willing to supply the loss.
In one respect he was not mistaken. The afflictions which threw the
niece of Walter a dependant upon his bounty, and a charge upon his
attention, revived in some measure his almost smothered and in part
forgotten regards of kindred; and with a tolerably good grace he came
forward to the duty, and took the orphan to the asylum, such as it was,
to which his brother's death-bed prayer had recommended her.
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