wealth of shining hair, and for all time--aye, for eternity--his fate
was fixed. The dark image of Inez as his wife faded out of his mind,
never to return more.

The earthly name of this dazzling divinity in yellow ringlets and pink
muslin was Ethel Margaretta--Dobb!

Dobb! It might have disenchanted a less rapturous adorer--it fell
powerless on Sir Victor Catheron's infatuated ear.

It was at Margate this meeting took place--that most popular and most
vulgar of all English watering-places; and the Cheshire baronet had
looked just once at the peach-bloom face, the blue eyes of laughing
light, the blushing, dimpling, seventeen-year-old face, and fallen in
love at once and forever.

He was a very impetuous young man, a very selfish and unstable young
man, with whom, all his life, to wish was to have. He had been spoiled
by a doting mother from his cradle, spoiled by obsequious servants,
spoiled by Inez Catheron's boundless worship. And he wished for this
"rose of the rose-bud garden of girls" as he had never wished for
anything in his two-and-twenty years of life. As a man in a dream he
went through that magic ceremony, "Miss Dobb, allow me to present my
friend, Sir Victor Catheron," and they were free to look at each other,
talk to each other, fall in love with each other as much as they
pleased. As in a dream he lingered by her side three golden hours, as
in a dream he said, "Good afternoon," and walked back to his hotel
smoking a cigar, the world glorified above and about him. As in a
dream they told him she was the only daughter and heiress of a
well-to-do London soap-boiler, and he did not wake.