HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT



CHAPTER I

SHEWING HOW WRATH BEGAN


When Louis Trevelyan was twenty-four years old, he had all the
world before him where to choose; and, among other things, he chose
to go to the Mandarin Islands, and there fell in love with Emily
Rowley, the daughter of Sir Marmaduke, the governor. Sir Marmaduke
Rowley, at this period of his life, was a respectable middle-aged
public servant, in good repute, who had, however, as yet achieved
for himself neither an exalted position nor a large fortune. He
had been governor of many islands, and had never lacked employment;
and now, at the age of fifty, found himself at the Mandarins, with
a salary of 3,000 pounds a year, living in a temperature at which
80 in the shade is considered to be cool, with eight daughters,
and not a shilling saved. A governor at the Mandarins who is social
by nature and hospitable on principle, cannot save money in the
islands even on 3,000 pounds a year when he has eight daughters.
And at the Mandarins, though hospitality is a duty, the gentlemen
who ate Sir Rowley's dinners were not exactly the men whom he or
Lady Rowley desired to welcome to their bosoms as sons-in-law. Nor
when Mr Trevelyan came that way, desirous of seeing everything in
the somewhat indefinite course of his travels, had Emily Rowley,
the eldest of the flock, then twenty years of age, seen as yet any
Mandariner who exactly came up to her fancy. And, as Louis Trevelyan