“O, but he does. He answers no end of letters every morning. Lady Lochinvar says he is a most wonderful young man. He attends to her house accounts here. I am afraid she would be very extravagant if she were not well looked after. She has no idea of business. Mr. Stuart has even to manage her dressmakers.”
“Then one may suppose he is really useful—even at Nice. Has he any means of his own, or is he entirely dependent on his aunt?”
“O, he has an income of his own—a modest income, Mrs. Murray says, hardly enough for him to get along easily in a cavalry regiment, but quite enough for him as a civilian; and his aunt will leave him everything. His expectations are splendid.”
“Well, Pamela, I will not call him an adventurer, and I shall be pleased to make his acquaintance, if he will call upon me.”
“He is dying to know you. May Mrs. Murray bring him to tea to-morrow afternoon?”
“With pleasure.”
CHAPTER II
IN THE MORNING OF LIFE.
George Greswold succumbed to Fate. He had done all he could do in the way of resistance. He had appealed against his wife’s decision; he had set love against principle or prejudice, and principle, as Mildred understood it, had been too strong for love; so there was nothing left for the forsaken husband but submission. He went back to the home in which he had once been happy, and he sat down amidst the ruins of his domestic life; he sat by his desolate hearth through the long dull wintry months, and he made no effort to bring brightness or variety into his existence. He made no stand against unmerited misfortune.
“I am too old to forget,” he told himself; “that lesson can only be learnt in youth.”
A young man might have gone out as a wanderer—might have sought excitement and distraction amidst strange cities and strange races of men; might have found forgetfulness in danger and hardship, the perils of unexplored deserts, the hazards of untrodden mountains, the hairbreadth escapes of savage life, pestilence, famine, warfare. George Greswold felt no inclination for any such adventure. The mainspring of life had snapped, and he admitted to himself that he was a broken man.