appeared over his signature, few readers attached any meaning to the
name. Jerome Otway had fought his fight and was forgotten.

He married, for the first time, at one-and-twenty, his choice being
the daughter of an impoverished "county" family, a girl neither
handsome nor sweet-natured, but, as it seemed, much in sympathy with
his humanitarian views. Properly speaking, he did not choose her;
the men who choose, who deliberately select a wife, are very few,
and Jerome Otway could never have been one of them. He was ardent
and impulsive; marriage becoming a necessity, he clutched at the
first chance which in any way addressed his imagination; and the
result was calamitous. In a year or two his wife repented the
thoughtlessness with which she had sacrificed the possibilities of
her birth and breeding for marriage with a man of no wealth. Narrow
of soul, with a certain frothy intelligence, she quickly outgrew the
mood of social rebellion which had originated in personal
discontent, and thenceforward she had nothing but angry scorn for
the husband who allowed her to live in poverty. Two sons were born
to them; the elder named Daniel (after O'Connell), the second called
Alexander (after the Russian Herzen). For twelve years they lived in
suppressed or flagrant hostility; then Mrs. Otway died of cholera.
To add to the bitterness of her fate, she had just received, from
one of her "county" relatives, a legacy of a couple of thousand
pounds.

This money, which became his own, Otway invested in a newspaper then
being started by certain of his friends; a paper, as it seemed,
little likely to have commercial success, but which, after many
changes of editorship, ultimately became an established organ of
Liberalism. The agitator retained an interest in this venture, and