astes nor habits
suited him. The fortune which he would have dispensed with dignity
and munificence he was eternally taught to believe should be the
stepping-stone to something higher in rank. All his influence in the
City, of which he was justly proud, he was told was a mere vulgar
ambition in comparison with that a coronet would bestow on him; and,
in fact, having believed himself the leading man of a great section in
society, he was led to look upon his position with discontent, and fancy
that his just claims were disregarded and denied. Lady Hester Onslow,
who having once been a beauty and the admired belle of royalty itself,
had accepted the banker in a moment of pique, and never forgave him
afterwards the unhappy preference.

Belonging to a very ancient but poor family, few were surprised at her
accepting a husband some thirty-odd years her senior; and it is probable
that she would fully have recognized the prudence of her choice if, by
the death of a distant relative in India, which occurred a few months
after her marriage, she had not acquired a very large fortune. This
sudden accession of wealth coming, as she herself said, "too late,"
embittered every hour of her after-life.

Had she been but wealthy a few months back, she had married the man
she loved, or whom she thought she loved, the heartless, handsome,
well-mannered Lord Norwood, a penniless viscount, ruined before he came
of age, and with no other means of support than the faculties which
knavery had sharpened into talent.

Miss Onslow and her brother, both the children of a former marriage,
were strikingly like their father, not alone in feature, but in the
traits of his frank and generous character. They were devotedly attached
to him, not the less, perhaps, from the circumstances of a marriage to
which they were strongly opposed, and whose results they now saw in many
a passage of discord and disagreement.

George and Sydney Onslow were both dark-complexioned and black-eyed,
and had many traits of Spanish origin in appearance, their mother having
been from that country. Lady Hester was a blonde, and affected to think
that the Southern tint was but an approximation to the negro. Nor was
she less critical on their manners, whose joyous freedom she pronounced
essentially vulgar. Such, in a few words, were the discordant elements
which Fate had bound up as a family, and who now, by the sudden illness
of Sir Stafford, were driven to seek refuge in the