lustration]

When Louis Trevelyan was twenty-four years old, he had all the world
before him where to choose; and, among other things, he chose to go
to the Mandarin Islands, and there fell in love with Emily Rowley,
the daughter of Sir Marmaduke, the governor. Sir Marmaduke Rowley,
at this period of his life, was a respectable middle-aged public
servant, in good repute, who had, however, as yet achieved for
himself neither an exalted position nor a large fortune. He had been
governor of many islands, and had never lacked employment; and now,
at the age of fifty, found himself at the Mandarins, with a salary
of L3,000 a year, living in a temperature at which 80 deg. in the shade
is considered to be cool, with eight daughters, and not a shilling
saved. A governor at the Mandarins who is social by nature and
hospitable on principle, cannot save money in the islands even on
L3,000 a year when he has eight daughters. And at the Mandarins,
though hospitality is a duty, the gentlemen who ate Sir Rowley's
dinners were not exactly the men whom he or Lady Rowley desired to
welcome to their bosoms as sons-in-law. Nor when Mr. Trevelyan came
that way, desirous of seeing everything in the somewhat indefinite
course of his travels, had Emily Rowley, the eldest of the flock,
then twenty years of age, seen as yet any Mandariner who exactly came
up to her fancy. And, as Louis Trevelyan was a remarkably handsome
young man, who was well connected, who had been ninth wrangler at
Cambridge, who had already published a volume of poems, and who
possessed L3,000 a year of his own, arising from various perfectly
secure investments, he was not forced to sigh long in vain. Indeed,
the Rowleys, one and all, felt that providence had been very good to
them in sending young Trevelyan on his travels in that direction, for
he seemed to be a very pearl among men. Both Sir Marmaduke and Lady
Rowley felt that there might be objections to such a marriage as that
proposed to them, raised by the Trevelyan family. Lady Rowley would
not have liked her daughter to go to England, to be received with
cold looks by strangers. But it soon appeared that there was no one
to make objections. Louis, the lover, had no living relative nearer
than cousins. His father, a barrister of repute, had died a widower,
and had left the money which he had made to an only child. The head
of the family was a first cousin who lived in Cornwall on a moderate
property,--a very good so