eful as to be the scandal of the county and
the subject of gossip for many a day.

From that hour the innocent Lady Wildairs did not raise her head. Her
family had rejected her on account of her marriage with a rake so
unfashionable and of reputation so coarse. Wildairs Hall, ill kept, and
going to ruin through the wasteful living of its spendthrift master,
was no place for such guests as were ladies and gentlemen. The only
visitors who frequented it were a dozen or so chosen spirits who shared
Sir Jeoffry's tastes--hunted, drank, gambled with him, and were as
loose livers as himself. My Lady Wildairs, grown thin, yellow, and
haggard, shrank into her own poor corner of the big house, a bare west
wing where she bore her children in lonely suffering and saw them die,
one after the other, two only having the strength to survive. She was
her lord's hopeless slave, and at the same time the mere knowledge of
her existence was an irritation to him, she being indeed regarded by
him as a Sultan might regard the least fortunate of his harem.

"Damn her," he cried once to one of his cronies, a certain Lord
Eldershaw, "in these days I hate the sight of her, with her skinny
throat and face. What's a woman for, after she looks like that? If she
were not hanging about my neck I could marry some fine strapping girl
who would give me an heir before a year was out."

If young Roxholm did not hear this special anecdote, he heard others
from various sources which were productive in him of many puzzled and
somewhat anxious thoughts. "Why was it," he pondered, "that women who
had not the happy fortune of his mother seemed at so cruel a
disadvantage--that men who were big and handsome having won them, grew
tired of them and cast them aside, with no care for their loneliness
and pain? Why had God so made them that they seemed as helpless as poor
driven sheep? 'Twas not fair it should be so--he could not feel it
honest, though he was beset by grave fears at his own contumacy since
he had been taught that God ordained all things. Had he ordained this,
that men should be tyrants, and base, and cruel, and that women should
be feeble victims who had but the power to moan and die and be
forgotten? There was my Lord Peterborough, who had fought against
Algerine pirates, and at nineteen crowned his young brow with glory in
action at Tripoli. To the boyish mind he was a figure so brilliant and
gallant and to be adored that it seemed impossible to all