back, and to
begin again from the beginning,--not always very comfortably after the
abnormal brightness of his few opening pages; and the reader who is
then involved in some ancient family history, or long local
explanation, feels himself to have been defrauded. It is as though one
were asked to eat boiled mutton after woodcocks, caviare, or maccaroni
cheese. I hold that it is better to have the boiled mutton first, if
boiled mutton there must be.

The story which I have to tell is something in its nature akin to that
of poor Mrs. Jones, who was happy enough down in Devonshire till that
wicked Lieutenant Smith came and persecuted her; not quite so tragic,
perhaps, as it is stained neither by murder nor madness. But before I
can hope to interest readers in the perplexed details of the life of a
not unworthy lady, I must do more than remind them that they do know,
or might have known, or should have known the antecedents of my
personages. I must let them understand how it came to pass that so
pretty, so pert, so gay, so good a girl as Mary Lovelace, without any
great fault on her part, married a man so grim, so gaunt, so sombre,
and so old as Lord George Germain. It will not suffice to say that she
had done so. A hundred and twenty little incidents must be dribbled
into the reader's intelligence, many of them, let me hope, in such
manner that he shall himself be insensible to the process. But unless I
make each one of them understood and appreciated by my ingenious,
open-hearted, rapid reader,--by my reader who will always have his
fingers impatiently ready to turn the page,--he will, I know, begin to
masticate the real kernel of my story with infinite prejudices against
Mary Lovelace.

Mary Lovelace was born in a country parsonage; but at the age of
fourteen, when her life was in truth beginning, was transferred by her
father to the deanery of Brotherton. Dean Lovelace had been a fortunate
man in life. When a poor curate, a man of very humble origin, with none
of what we commonly call Church interest, with nothing to recommend him
but a handsome person, moderate education, and a quick intellect, he
had married a lady with a considerable fortune, whose family had bought
for him a living. Here he preached himself into fame. It is not at all
to be implied from this that he had not deserved the fame he acquired.
He had been active and resolute in his work, holding opinions which, if
not peculiar, were at any rate advanced,