and refreshing. People liked his rugged good humor. He speedily made
friends, among them Lady Jane Blunt, the still youthful widow of a man
about town, who, after trying for several years to live at the rate of
ten thousand per annum with an income of two and a half, had finally
given up the struggle and drank himself peacefully into the tomb,
leaving her in sole charge of their one son, Spencer Archbald.

Possibly because he was the exact antithesis of the late lamented,
Lady Jane found herself drawn to Mr. McEachern. Whatever his faults,
he had strength; and after her experience of married life with a weak
man, Lady Jane had come to the conclusion that strength was the only
male quality worth consideration. When a year later, McEachern's
daughter, Molly, had come over, it was Lady Jane who took her under
her wing and introduced her everywhere.

In the fifth month of the second year of their acquaintance, Mr.
McEachern proposed and was accepted. "The bridegroom," said a society
paper, "is one of those typical captains of industry of whom our
cousins 'across the streak' can boast so many. Tall, muscular,
square-shouldered, with the bulldog jaw and twinkling gray eye of the
born leader. You look at him and turn away satisfied. You have seen a
man!"

Lady Jane, who had fallen in love with the abbey some years before,
during a visit to the neighborhood, had prevailed upon her
square-shouldered lord to turn his twinkling gray eye in that
direction, and the captain of industry, with the remark that here, at
last, was a real bully old sure-fire English stately home, had sent
down builders and their like, not in single spies, but in battalions,
with instructions to get busy.