uently at Minchinghampton, and then he became
head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a high-class
preparatory school at Seagate. He was extremely successful for some
years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, and then disaster
overtook him in the shape of a divorce. His wife, William Porphyry's
mother, made the acquaintance of a rich young man named Nolan, who was
recuperating at Seagate from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a
gun accident in Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was divorced.
She was, however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden
only three days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree
absolute. Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise
and sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
Marayne, the great London surgeon.

Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and he
left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham
and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have
injured. With this and a husband already distinguished, she returned
presently to London, and was on the whole fairly well received there.

It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
divorce fell. There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that a
schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more valuable
proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in England is against
any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And
also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him
if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts
to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now
only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent,
he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the
curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a
considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory
and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes,
including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury,
to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but enhance
the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had created in the limited
opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed. One
bo