The town, an insignificant village, was five miles distant, and
surrounding the mansion were many broad acres which rather isolated it
from its neighbors. Moreover, Elmhurst was the one important estate in
the county, and the simple, hard-working farmers in its vicinity
considered, justly enough, that the owner was wholly out of their class.
This was not the owner's fault, and Kenneth had brooded upon the matter
until he had come to regard it as a distinct misfortune. For it isolated
him and deprived him of any social intercourse with his neighbors.
The boy had come to live at Elmhurst when he was a mere child, but only
as a dependent upon the charities of Aunt Jane, who had accepted the
charge of the orphan because he was a nephew of her dead lover, who had
bequeathed her his estate of Elmhurst. Aunt Jane was Kenneth's aunt
merely in name, since she had never even married the uncle to whom she
had been betrothed, and who had been killed in an accident before the
boy was born.
She was an irritable old woman, as Kenneth knew her, and had never shown
him any love or consideration. He grew up in a secluded corner of the
great house, tended merely by servants and suffered to play in those
quarters of the ample grounds which Aunt Jane did not herself visit.
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