schoolroom, whom he had picked out as my future wife.

"It was his wish that we should be married when I was twenty-five and
the girl eighteen; but I was not yet twenty-two, so that there were at
least three years of grace before he could begin to try and impose his
design upon us. And he was old and ill, and I had heard that the doctors
didn't give him more than a year or two, at most, to live. I thought
that if Juliana and I were married secretly he would die before the
question of my marriage had time to become one of practical politics;
and I persuaded her to agree to a private marriage, which we would
announce to the world as soon as my eccentric old grandfather was safely
out of it. There was no possible obstacle to our marriage except the old
man's domineering temper. Juliana Sandfort was my superior in every
possible sense, worldly or otherwise; but I came of a good family, was
to inherit an old name and title, and a more than sufficient fortune so
long as I kept on the right side of the old Lord, and we both knew that
there was no objection to be feared from her relations or from any other
one of mine. In short, much as she disliked doing things in that
hole-and-corner sort of way, and ashamed as I was at heart of asking her
to, we neither of us could see much actual harm in the idea, and we were
married accordingly at a registry office in London. Everything would
have been well, and all would have gone as we hoped, but for the one
unforeseen and horrible calamity. My wife died six months before my
grandfather, on the day her baby was born."

Lord Ashiel paused, and sat gazing before him, over Gimblet's shoulder.
There was a look on his face which showed that for the moment he was
blind to the scene that lay in front of him, and that he saw in place of
the bureau which stood opposite to him, and of the Oriental china which
was the detective's special pride, and on which his eyes seemed to be