Major Grantly had been a successful man in life--with the one exception
of having lost the mother of his child within a twelve-month of his
marriage and within a few hours of that child's birth. He had served in
India as a very young man, and had been decorated with the Victoria
Cross. Then he had married a lady with some money, and had left the
active service of the army, with the concurring advice of his own family
and that of his wife. He had taken a small place in his father's county,
but the wife for whose comfort he had taken it had died before she was
permitted to see it. Nevertheless he had gone to reside there, hunting a
good deal and farming a little, making himself popular in the district,
and keeping up the good name of Grantly in a successful way,
till--alas!,--it had seemed good to him to throw those favouring eyes on
poor Grace Crawley. His wife had now been dead just two years, and he
was still under thirty, no one could deny it would be right that he
should marry again. No one did deny it. His father had hinted that he
ought to do so, and had generously whispered that if some little
increase to the major's present income were needed, he might possibly be
able to do something. 'What is the good of keeping it?' the archdeacon
had said in a liberal after-dinner warmth; 'I only want it for your
brother and yourself.' The brother was a clergyman.

And the major's mother had strongly advised him to marry again without
loss of time. 'My dear Henry,' she had said, 'you'll never be younger,
and youth does go for something. As for dear little Edith, being a girl,
she is almost no impediment. Do you know those two girls at
Chaldicotes?'

'What, Mrs Thorne's nieces?'