on for his daughters. But by a man of his
habits and his property, such a burden as this could hardly have been
accounted any burden at all. That he did, however, in this mental
privacy of his carry some heavy burden, was made plain enough to all
who knew him.

And Lady Fitzgerald was in many things a counterpart of her husband,
not in health so much as in spirits. She, also, was old for her age,
and woebegone, not only in appearance, but also in the inner workings
of her heart. But then it was known of her that she had undergone
deep sorrows in her early youth, which had left their mark upon her
brow, and their trace upon her inmost thoughts. Sir Thomas had not
been her first husband. When very young, she had been married, or
rather, given in marriage, to a man who in a very few weeks after
that ill-fated union had shown himself to be perfectly unworthy of
her.

Her story, or so much of it as was known to her friends, was this.
Her father had been a clergyman in Dorsetshire, burdened with a small
income, and blessed with a large family. She who afterwards became
Lady Fitzgerald was his eldest child; and, as Miss Wainwright--Mary
Wainwright--had grown up to be the possessor of almost perfect female
loveliness. While she was yet very young, a widower with an only boy,
a man who at that time was considerably less than thirty, had come
into her father's parish, having rented there a small hunting-box.
This gentleman--we will so call him, in lack of some other
term--immediately became possessed of an establishment, at any rate
eminently respectable. He had three hunters, two grooms, and a gig;
and on Sundays went to church with a prayer-book in his hand, and
a black coat on his back. What more could be desired to prove his
respectability?

He had not been there a month before he was intimate in the parson's
house. Before two months had passed he was engaged to the parson's
daughter. Before the full quarter had flown by, he and the parson's
daughter were man and wife; and in five months from the time of his
first appearance in the Dorsetshire parish, he had flown from his
creditors, leaving behind him his three horses, his two grooms, his
gig, his wife, and his little boy.

The Dorsetshire neighbours, and especially the Dorsetshire ladies,
had at first been loud in their envious exclamations as to Miss
Wainwright's luck. The parson and the parson's wife, and poor Mary
Wainwright herself, had, according to the sayings o