CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE BOY GROWS UP



1


Benham was the son of a schoolmaster. His father was assistant
first at Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then
he became head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a
high-class preparatory school at Seagate. He was extremely
successful for some years, as success goes in the scholastic
profession, and then disaster overtook him in the shape of a
divorce. His wife, William Porphyry's mother, made the acquaintance
of a rich young man named Nolan, who was recuperating at Seagate
from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a gun accident in
Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was divorced. She was,
however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden only three
days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree absolute.
Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise and
sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
Marayne, the great London surgeon.

Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and
he left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs.
Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed