g proceeded in
a slightly altered voice, in which I thought I detected a note of not
unnatural umbrage.

But far greater coincidences were in store, and those of such a
character that it was certainly difficult to believe that they were
anything of the sort. Considered as an attempt at dramatic narrative,
the story was, of course, beneath criticism. It was all redundant
description, gratuitous explanations, facetious turns to serious
sentences, and declared intentions which entirely spoilt the effect of
their due fulfilment. Bored to extinction with the heroine, who only
became interesting on the villain's advent, as his predestined prey, we
thenceforth heard no more of her until his antecedents had been set
forth in solid slabs of the pluperfect tense. These dwelt with stolid
solemnity upon the distinctions and debaucheries of his University
career, and then all at once on the effect of subsequent travel upon a
cynical yet impressionable mind. In an instant both of us were
attending, and even I guessed what was coming, and what had happened.
Probably by half-forgotten hearsay, our dear good lady had tapped the
same muddy stream as Uvo Delavoye, and some of the mud had silted into a
mind too innocent to appreciate its quality.

"Debased and degraded by the wicked splendours of barbaric courts, the
unprincipled young nobleman had decided not only to 'do in Turkey as the
Turkeys did,' but to initiate the heathen institution of polygamy among
his own broad acres on his return to England, home, and only too much
beauty!... Poor, innocent, confiding Millicent; little did she dream,
when he asked her to be his, that he only meant 'one of the many'; that
the place awaiting her was but her niche in the _seraglio_ which he had
wickedly had built, in a corner of his stately grounds, on some Eastern
model."

Delavoye looked at me without a trace of amusement, but rather in
alarmed recognition of the weirdly sustained parallel between rascal
fact and foolish fiction. But as yet we had only scratched the thin ice
of the situation; soon we were almost shuddering from our knowledge of
the depths below.

The unhappy heroine had repulsed the advances of the villain in the
story as in the actual case; in both she was from the same locality
(where, however, our Vicar had held his last curacy); in both, enticed
into his lordship's coach and driven off at a great rate to his London
mansion, where the first phase of her harrowing advent