respectabilities of the middle of this century, the daughter of an
ironmonger would fall in love with a married clergyman? Perhaps to their
present biographer it seems more remarkable than to his readers. He
remembers what the Eastern Midlands were like fifty years ago and they do
not. They are thinking of Eastthorpe of the present day, of its
schoolgirls who are examined in Keats and Shelley, of the Sunday morning
walks there, and of the, so to speak, smelling acquaintance with
sceptical books and theories which half the population now boasts. But
Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different. It
knew what it was for parsons to go wrong. It had not forgotten a former
rector and the young woman at the Bell. What talk there was about that
affair! Happily his friends were well connected: they exerted
themselves, and he obtained a larger sphere of usefulness two hundred
miles away. Mr. Cardew, however, was not that rector, and Catharine was
not the pretty waitress, and it is time now to tell the promised early
history of Mr. Cardew.

He was the son of a well-to-do London merchant, who lived in Stockwell,
in a large, white house, with a garden of a couple of acres, shaded by a
noble cedar in its midst. There were four children, but he was the only
boy. His mother belonged to an old and very religious family, and
inherited all its traditions of Calvinistic piety and decorum. Her love
for this boy was boundless, and she had a double ambition for him, which
was that he might become a minister of God's Word, and in due time might
marry Jane Berdoe, the only daughter of the Reverend Charles Berdoe,
M.A., and Euphemia, her dearest friend. Mrs. Cardew had heard so much of
the contamination of boys' schools that Theophilus was educated at home
and sent straight from home to Cambridge. At the University he became a
member of the ultra-evangelical sect of young men there, and devoted
himself entirely to theology. He thus passed through youth and early
manhood without any intercourse with the world so called, and he lacked
that wholesome influence which is exercised by healthy companionship with
those who differ from us and are not afraid to oppose us. Of course he
married Jane Berdoe. His mother was always contriving that Jane should
be present when he was at home; he was young; he had never known what it
was to go astray with women, and he was unable to stand at a distance
from her and ask hims