ards 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 developed a domestic side.

Greta was born to them after a year of marriage. The instinct of the
"freeman" was, however, not dead in Paul; he became a gambler. He lost
the remainder of his fortune without being greatly disturbed. When
he began to lose his wife's fortune too things naturally became more
difficult. Not too mu