y
Reynolds, still to be seen above the carved wainscoting of one of the old
City halls, shows a wonderfully handsome and clever face, but at the same
time a wonderfully cold and heartless one. It is the face of a woman
half weary of, half sneering at the world. One reads in old family
letters, whereof the ink is now very faded and the paper very yellow,
long criticisms of this portrait. The writers complain that if the
picture is at all like her she must have greatly changed since her
girlhood, for they remember her then as having a laughing and winsome
expression.

They say--they who knew her in after-life--that this earlier face came
back to her in the end, so that the many who remembered opening their
eyes and seeing her bending down over them could never recognise the
portrait of the beautiful sneering lady, even when they were told whom it
represented.

But at the time of John Ingerfield's strange wooing she was the Anne
Singleton of Sir Joshua's portrait, and John Ingerfield liked her the
better that she was.

He had no feeling of sentiment in the matter himself, and it simplified
the case that she had none either. He offered her a plain bargain, and
she accepted it. For all he knew or cared, her attitude towards this
subject of marriage was the usual one assumed by women. Very young girls
had their heads full of romantic ideas. It was better for her and for
him that she had got rid of them.

"Ours will be a union founded on good sense," said John Ingerfield.

"Let us hope the experiment will succeed," said Anne Singleton.

CHAPTER II.

But the experiment does not succeed. The laws of God decree that man
shall purchase woman, that woman shall give herself to man, for other
coin than that of good sense. Good sense is not a legal tender in the
marriage mart. Men and women who enter therein with only sense in their
purse have no right to complain if, on reaching home, they find they have
concluded an unsatisfactory bargain.

John Ingerfield, when he asked Anne Singleton to be his wife, felt no
more love for her than he felt for any of the other sumptuous household
appointments he was purchasing about the same time, and made no pretence
of doing so. Nor, had he done so, would she have believed him; for Anne
Singleton has learned much in her twenty-two summers and winters, and
knows that love is only a meteor in life's sky, and that the true
lodestar of this world is gold. Anne Singleton has