vided up among his three surviving
children--Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-known
firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance, married to
a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death engaged to the
curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly afterwards became its
rector. By his marriage with Margaret Treffry the rector had one child
called Christian. Soon after this he came into some property, and died,
leaving it unfettered to his widow. Three years went by, and when the
child was six years old, Mrs. Devorell, still young and pretty, came to
live in London with her brother Nicholas. It was there that she met Paul
von Morawitz--the last of an old Czech family, who had lived for many
hundred years on their estates near Budweiss. Paul had been left an
orphan at the age of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre. Instead
of acres, he inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von
Morawitz. In later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith,
but it stayed quietly with him all the same. The absence of acres was of
no great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker in
Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune. It befitted a von Morawitz
that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for soldiering, he soon
left the Service; some said he had a difference with his Colonel over the
quality of food provided during some manoeuvres; others that he had
retired because his chargers did not fit his legs, which were, indeed,
rather round.

He had an admirable appetite for pleasure; a man-about-town's life suited
him. He went his genial, unreflecting, costly way in Vienna, Paris,
London. He loved exclusively those towns, and boasted that he was as
much at home in one as in another. He combined exuberant vitality with
fastidiousness of palate, and devoted both to the acquisition of a
special taste in women, weeds, and wines; above all he was blessed with a
remarkable digestion. He was thirty when he met Mrs. Devorell; and she
married him because he was so very different from anybody she had ever
seen. People more dissimilar were never mated. To Paul--accustomed to
stage doors--freshness, serene tranquillity, and obvious purity were the
baits; he had run through more than half his fortune, too, and the fact
that she had money was possibly not overlooked. Be that as it may, he
was fond of her; his heart was soft, he deve