"I should very likely have to give up Parliament."
Sir James ruminated, and took up his half-smoked cigar for counsel.
"I can't imagine, Oliver, that your mother would push her opposition to quite that point. But, in any case, you have forgotten Miss Mallory's own fortune."
"It has never entered into my thoughts!" cried Marsham, with an emphasis which Sir James knew to be honest. "But, in any case, I cannot live upon my wife. If I could not find something to do, I should certainly give up politics."
His tone had become a little dry and bitter, his aspect gray.
Sir James surveyed him a moment--pondering.
"You will find plenty of ways out, Oliver--plenty! The sympathy of all the world will be with you. You have won a beautiful and noble creature. She has been brought up under a more than Greek fate. You will rescue her from it. You will show her how to face it--and how to conquer it."
A tremor swept across Marsham's handsome mouth. But the perplexity and depression in the face remained.
Sir James had a slight consciousness of rebuff. But it disappeared in his own emotion. He resumed:
"She ought to be told the story--perhaps with some omissions--at once. Her mother"--he spoke with a slow precision, forcing out the words--"was not a bad woman. If you like, I will break it to Miss Mallory. I am probably more intimately acquainted with the story than any one else now living."