CHAPTER I.


There is a vast deal talked in the present day about Freewill. We
like to feel that we are independent agents and are ready to overlook
the fact that our surroundings and circumstances and the hundred and
one subtle and mysterious workings of the fate we can none of us
escape, control our actions and are responsible for our movements,
and make us to a great extent what we are.

A man is not even a free agent when he takes the most important step
of his whole life, and marries a wife. He is impelled to it by
considerations outside of himself; it affects not only his own
present and future, but that of others, very often, and he must be
guided accordingly.

Emerson says; "The soul has inalienable rights, and the first of
these is love," but he does not say marriage. Love is the business of
the idle and the idleness of the busy, but marriage is quite another
affair--a grave matter, and not to be undertaken lightly, since it is
the one step that can never be retraced, save through the unsavoury
channels of shame and notoriety, or death itself.

But perhaps Jack Chetwynd was hampered with fewer restraining
influences than most men, for he was alone in the world, without kith
or kin, and might be fairly allowed to please himself, and pleasing
himself in this case meant leading to the altar, or rather to the
Registry Office, Miss Bella Blackall, music-hall singer and step
dancer.