son John Caldigate, that they two could not live together in comfort in
the days of the young man's early youth. And yet it would have been much
for both of them that such comfortable association should have been
possible to them. Wherever the fault lay, or the chief fault--for
probably there was some on both sides--the misfortune was so great as to
bring crushing troubles upon each of them.

There were but the two of which to make a household. When John was
fifteen, and had been about a year at Harrow, he lost his mother and his
two little sisters almost at a blow. The two girls went first, and the
poor mother, who had kept herself alive to see them die, followed them
almost instantly. Then Daniel Caldigate had been alone.

And he was a man who knew how to live alone,--a just, hard,
unsympathetic man,--of whom his neighbours said, with something of
implied reproach, that he bore up strangely when he lost his wife and
girls. This they said, because he was to be seen riding about the
country, and because he was to be heard talking to the farmers and
labourers as though nothing special had happened to him. It was rumoured
of him, too, that he was as constant with his books as before; and he
had been a man always constant with his books; and also that he had
never been seen to shed a tear, or been heard to speak of those who had
been taken from him.

He was, in truth, a stout, self-constraining man, silent unless when he
had something to say. Then he could become loud enough, or perhaps it
might be said, eloquent. To his wife he had been inwardly affectionate,
but outwardly almost stern. To his daughters he had been the
same,--always anxious for every good thing on their behalf, but never
able to make the children conscious of this anxiety. When they were