e doctor on the one
side, and the magistrate on the other. Careful never to outrage the
decrees of either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though stout; and
had achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding
all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (_nee_ Eppington), were as
ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist seeking
material for a problem play. As they stood before the altar on their
wedding morn, they might have been taken as symbolising satyr and saint.
More than twenty years his junior, beautiful with the beauty of a
Raphael's Madonna, his every touch of her seemed a sacrilege. Yet once
in his life Mr. Blake played the part of a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake,
on the same occasion, contenting herself with a singularly mean
_role_--mean even for a woman in love.

The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience. Blake, to do
him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond admiration and
regard. Few things grow monotonous sooner than irregularity. He would
tickle his jaded palate with respectability, and try for a change the
companionship of a good woman. The girl's face drew him, as the
moonlight holds a man who, bored by the noise, turns from a heated room
to press his forehead to the window-pane. Accustomed to bid for what he
wanted, he offered his price. The Eppington family was poor and
numerous. The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a
narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with martyrdom
for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher price, and then
sold herself.

To a drama of this description, a lover is necessary, if the
complications are to be of interest to the outside world. Harry Sennett,
a pleasant-looking enough young fellow, in spite of his receding chin,
was possessed, perhaps, of more good intention than sense. Under the
influence of Edith's stronger character he was soon persuaded to
acquiesce meekly in the proposed arrangement. Both succeeded in
convincing themselves that they were acting nobly. The tone of the
farewell interview, arranged for the eve of the wedding, would have been
fit and proper to the occasion had Edith been a modern Joan of Arc about
to sacrifice her own happiness on the altar of a great cause; as the girl
was merely selling herself into ease and luxury, for no higher motive
than the desire to enable a certain number of more or less worthy
relatives