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Unlike as they might be, they were first cousins, and had been brought up together, until, as their friends and they themselves averred, they were more like brother and sister than cousins. At seventeen and one-and-twenty respectively, they fell in love with each other, were engaged, and fell out again with remarkable rapidity; the engagement was dissolved, but the habit of comradeship only interrupted, and never really broken. For a time, however, they saw little of each other. They were alone in the world, and had nobody to interfere with them. Arthur came up to London, and plunged into journalism and desultory, and rather Bohemian, literary life. Esther, whose passion was for learning, managed to get a scholarship at a woman’s college, and by means of it, and by the expenditure of her very small patrimony, secured four years of residence at Oxford. She was almost penniless when she left it, but she had secured a first class in history, had excellent testimonials, and was confident of her powers of earning her own living