Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him.
Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she knew her father well.
Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of patronage.
In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life.
The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the death-blow to his own ambitions also.
He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric.
The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish landlord, was penniless.
She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders, and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the same emotion experienced in affluence.
Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well.
His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship—a temper which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle hands.