age, and had never been extravagant himself or in his family. His
estates were strictly entailed, and therefore, as he had only a life
interest in them, it of course was necessary that he should save
money and insure his life, to make provision for his daughters. But
by a man of his habits and his property, such a burden as this could
hardly have been accounted any burden at all. That he did, however,
in this mental privacy of his carry some heavy burden, was made
plain enough to all who knew him.

And Lady Fitzgerald was in many things a counterpart of her husband,
not in health so much as in spirits. She, also, was old for her age,
and woebegone, not only in appearance, but also in the inner
workings of her heart. But then it was known of her that she had
undergone deep sorrows in her early youth, which had left their mark
upon her brow, and their trace upon her inmost thoughts. Sir Thomas
had not been her first husband. When very young, she nad been
married, or rather, given in marriage, to a man who in a very few
weeks after that ill-fated union had shown himself to be perfectly
unworthy of her.

Her story, or so much of it as was known to her friends, was this.
Her father had been a clergyman in Dorsetshire, burdened with a
small income, and blessed with a large family. She who afterwards
became Lady Fitzgerald was his eldest child; and, as Miss Wainwright
--Mary Wainwright--had grown up to be the possessor of almost
perfect female loveliness. While she was yet very young, a widower
with an only boy, a man who at that time was considerably less than
thirty, had come into her father's parish, having rented there a
small hunting-box. This gentleman--we will so call him, in lack of
some other term--immediately became possessed of an establishment,