is earth, the nature of our sublunary love, the
obligations of this transient life and so on. He probably disclosed them
to his future wife. Miss Anthony's views of life were very decided too
but in a different way. I don't know the story of their wooing. I
imagine it was carried on clandestinely and, I am certain, with
portentous gravity, at the back of copses, behind hedges . . .

"Why was it carried on clandestinely?" I inquired.

"Because of the lady's father. He was a savage sentimentalist who had
his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives. He was a terror; but
the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his
wife's parentage. It stimulated his ingenuity too. Difficult--is it
not?--to introduce one's wife's maiden name into general conversation.
But my simple Fyne made use of Captain Anthony for that purpose, or else
I would never even have heard of the man. "My wife's sailor-brother" was
the phrase. He trotted out the sailor-brother in a pretty wide range of
subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of trade, talk of travels,
of seaside holidays and so on. Once I remember "My wife's sailor-brother
Captain Anthony" being produced in connection with nothing less recondite
than a sunset. And little Fyne never failed to add "The son of Carleon
Anthony, the poet--you know." He used to lower his voice for that
statement, and people were impressed or pretended to be."

The late Carleon Anthony, the poet, sang in his time of the domestic and
social amenities of our age with a most felicitous versification, his
object being, in his own words, "to glorify the result of six thousand
years' evolution towards the refinement of thought, manners and
feelings." Why he fixed the term at six thousand years I don't know. His
poems read like sentimental novels told in verse of a really superior
quality. You felt as if you were being taken out for a delightful
country drive by a charming lady in a pony carriage. But in his domestic
life that same Carleon Anthony showed traces of the primitive
cave-dweller's temperament. He was a massive, implacable man with a
handsome face, arbitrary and exacting with his dependants, but
marvellously suave in his manner to admiring strangers. These contrasted
displays must have been particularly exasperating to his long-suffering
family. After his second wife's death his boy, whom he persisted by a
mere whim in educating at home, ran away in co