"And she?—this—this Rose or Mary—daughter of a tailor—how old was she when you married her?"
"In her second year, I think," he replied meekly. "I just remember quite vaguely that after the ceremony she was carried screaming and kicking out of the church. That was the last I saw of my wife from that day to this—"
"Bah!"
"My great-uncle, the late Lord Stowmaries, shipped my father, mother and myself off to Virginia soon after that. My father had been something of a wastrel all his life and a thorn in the flesh of the old miser. The second time that he was locked up in a debtor's prison, Lord Stowmaries paid up for him on the condition that he went off to Virginia at once with my mother and myself, and never showed his face in England again."
"Hm! I remember hearing something of this when you, my lord, came into your title. But these—these—tailor people—who were they?"
"Madame Legros was a distant connection of my mother's who, I suppose, married the tailor for the same reason that I—an unfortunate lad without a will of my own—was made to marry the tailor's daughter."
"She is rich—of course?"
"Legros, the tailor, owns millions, I believe, and Rose Marie is his only child. It was the first time that my poor father, Captain Kestyon, found himself actually in prison and unable to pay his debts. The Earl of Stowmaries—a wicked old miser, if ever there was one—refused to come to his rescue. My mother was practically penniless then; she had no one to whom she could turn for succour except the cousin over in Paris, who had always been kind to her, who was passing rich, burning with social ambition, and glad enough to have the high-born English lady beneath her bourgeois roof."
"And that same burning social ambition caused the worthy tailor to consent to a marriage between his baby daughter and the scion of one of the grandest families in England," commented Mistress Julia calmly. "It were all so simple—if only you had had the manhood to tell me all this ere now."
"I thought that miserable marriage forever forgotten."