e, but the
records of them had been left in various grandchildren. There had
been a son born to Mr. Dosett, who was also a Reginald and a clerk
in the Admiralty, and who also, in his turn, had been a handsome
man. With him, in his decadence, the reader will become acquainted.
There were also two daughters, whose reputation for perfect feminine
beauty had never been contested. The elder had married a city man of
wealth,--of wealth when he married her, but who had become enormously
wealthy by the time of our story. He had when he married been simply
Mister, but was now Sir Thomas Tringle, Baronet, and was senior
partner in the great firm of Travers and Treason. Of Traverses and
Treasons there were none left in these days, and Mr. Tringle was
supposed to manipulate all the millions with which the great firm in
Lombard Street was concerned. He had married old Mr. Dosett's eldest
daughter, Emmeline, who was now Lady Tringle, with a house at the top
of Queen's Gate, rented at L1,500 a year, with a palatial moor in
Scotland, with a seat in Sussex, and as many carriages and horses as
would suit an archduchess. Lady Tringle had everything in the world;
a son, two daughters, and an open-handed stout husband, who was said
to have told her that money was a matter of no consideration.

The second Miss Dosett, Adelaide Dosett, who had been considerably
younger than her sister, had insisted upon giving herself to Egbert
Dormer, the artist, whose death we commemorated in our first line.
But she had died before her husband. They who remembered the two
Miss Dosetts as girls were wont to declare that, though Lady Tringle
might, perhaps, have had the advantage in perfection of feature and
in unequalled symmetry, Adelaide had been the more attractive from
expression and brilliancy. To her Lord Sizes had offered his hand
and coronet, promising to abandon for her sake all the haunts of his
matured life. To her Mr. Tringle had knelt before he had taken the
elder sister. For her Mr. Program, the popular preacher of the day,
for a time so totally lost himself that he was nearly minded to go
over to Rome. She was said to have had offers from a widowed Lord
Chancellor and from a Russian prince. Her triumphs would have quite
obliterated that of her sister had she not insisted on marrying
Egbert Dormer.

Then there had been, and still was, Reginald Dosett, the son of old
Dosett, and the eldest of the family. He too had married, and was now
living