been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul
as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping
herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl
was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who
can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
coast long since? Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
father's. You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
pointedly designed to express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to
the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
purse and scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in
her dress.

This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean
and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.

As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading. A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better. Her mother