The lady's name was Mabel Bolton. She was in distress of
spirit rather than of circumstances, for temptation was thick about one
so beautiful, to supply the vanities and luxuries of the father of sin.
He described her.

She was my first playfellow, the miller's daughter of Dipwell, Mabel
Sweetwinter, taken from her home by Lord Edbury during my German
university career, and now put away by him upon command of his family on
the eve of his marriage.

She herself related her history to me, after telling me that she had
seen me once at the steps of Edbury's Club. Our meeting was no great
surprise to either of us. She had heard my name as that of an expected
visitor; she had seen Temple, moreover, and he had prompted me with her
Christian name and the praise of her really glorious hair, to anticipate
the person who was ushered into the little cabin-like parlour by Captain
Welsh's good old mother.

Of Edbury she could not speak for grief, believing that he loved her
still and was acting under compulsion. Her long and faithful attachment
to the scapegrace seemed to preserve her from the particular regrets
Captain Welsh supposed to occupy her sinner's mind; so that, after
some minutes of the hesitation and strangeness due to our common
recollections, she talked of him simply and well--as befitted her
situation, a worldling might say. But she did not conceal her relief in
escaping to this quaint little refuge (she threw a kindly-comical
look, not overtoned, at the miniature ships on the mantelpiece, and
the picture of Joseph leading Mary with her babe on the ass) from the
temptations I could imagine a face like hers would expose her to. The
face was splendid, the figure already overblown. I breathed some thanks
to my father while she and I conversed apart. The miller was dead, her
brother in America. She had no other safe home than the one Captain
Welsh had opened to her. When I asked her (I had no excuse for it)
whether she would consent to go to Edbury again, she reddened and burst
into tears. I cursed my brutality. 'Let her cry,' said Captain Welsh
on parting with us at his street door. 'Tears are the way of women and
their comfort.'

To our astonishment he told us he intended to take her for a voyage in
the Priscilla. 'Why?' we asked.

'I take her,' he said, 'because not to do things wholly is worse than
not to do things at all, for it 's waste of time and cause for a
chorus below, down in hell, my young friends. The