ach Myatt. William Twemlow had been one of those
men in whom an unbridled appetite for virtue becomes a vice. He loved
God with such virulence that he killed his wife, drove his daughter into
a fatuous marriage, and quarrelled irrevocably with his son. The too
sensitive wife died for lack of joy; Alice escaped to Australia with a
parson who never accomplished anything but a large family; and Arthur,
at the age of seventeen, precociously cursed his father and sought in
America a land where there were fewer commandments. Then old Twemlow
told his junior partner, John Stanway, that the ways of Providence were
past finding out. Stanway sympathised with him, partly from motives of
diplomacy, and partly from a genuine misunderstanding of the case; for
Twemlow, mild, earnest, and a generous supporter of charities, was much
respected in the town, and his lonely predicament excited compassion;
most people looked upon young Arthur as a godless and heartless
vagabond.

Alice's husband was a fool, impulsive and vain; and, despite
introductions, no congregation in Australia could be persuaded to listen
to his version of the gospel; Alice gave birth to more children than bad
sermons could keep alive, and soon the old man at Bursley was regularly
sending remittances to her. Twemlow desired fervently to do his duty,
and moreover the estrangement from his son increased his satisfaction in
dealing handsomely with his daughter; the son would doubtless learn from
the daughter how much he had lost by his impiety. Seven years elapsed
so, and then the parson gave up his holy calling and became a
tea-blender in Brisbane. Twemlow was shocked at this defection, which
seemed to him sacrilegious, and a chance phrase in a letter of Alice's
requesting capital for the new venture--a too assured demand, an
insufficient gratitude for past benefits, Alice never quite knew
what--brought about a second breach in the Twemlow family. The paternal
purse was closed, and perhaps not too early, for the improvidence of the
tea-blender and Alice's fecundity were a gulf whose depth no munificence
could have plumbed. Again John Stanway sympathised with the now
enfeebled old man. John advised him to retire, and Twemlow decided to
do so, receiving one-third of the net profits of the partnership
business during life. In two years he was bedridden and the miserable
victim of a housekeeper; but, though both Alice and Arthur attempted
reconciliation, some fine point of c