'Yes, dear; my future husband is as nearly as possible half as old as I am.'
Mrs. Newsham's uneasy virtue shuddered. 'What a profanation of marriage!' she exclaimed.
'Nothing of the sort,' her friend pronounced positively. 'Marriage, by the law of England (as my lawyer tells me), is nothing but a contract. Who ever heard of profaning a contract?'
'Call it what you please, Matilda. Do you expect to live a happy life, at your age, with a young man for your husband?'
'A happy life,' Miss Dulane repeated, 'because it will be an innocent life.' She laid a certain emphasis on the last word but one.
Mrs. Newsham resented the emphasis, and rose to go. Her last words were the bitterest words that she had spoken yet.
'You have secured such a truly remarkable husband, my dear, that I am emboldened to ask a great favor. Will you give me his lordship's photograph?'
'No,' said Miss Dulane, 'I won't give you his lordship's photograph.'
'What is your objection, Matilda?'
'A very serious objection, Elizabeth. You are not pure enough in mind to be worthy of my husband's photograph.'
With that reply the first of the remonstrances assumed hostile proportions, and came to an untimely end.
II.
THE second remonstrance was reserved for a happier fate. It took its rise in a conversation between two men who were old and true friends. In other words, it led to no quarreling.
The elder man was one of those admirable human beings who are cordial, gentle, and good-tempered, without any conscious exercise of their own virtues. He was generally known in the world about him by a fond and familiar use of his Christian name. To call him 'Sir Richard' in these pages (except in the character of one of his servants) would be simply ridiculous. When he lent his money, his horses, his house, and (sometimes, after unlucky friends had dropped to the lowest social depths) even his clothes, this general benefactor was known, in the best society and the worst society alike, as 'Dick.' He filled the hundred mouths of Rumor with his nickname, in the days when there was an opera in London, as the proprietor of the 'Beauty-box.' The ladies who occupied the box were all invited under the same circumstances. They enjoyed operatic music; but their husbands and fathers were not rich enough to be able to gratify that expensive taste. Dick's carriage called for them, and took them home again; and the beauties all agreed (if he ever married) that Mrs. Dick would be the most enviable woman on the face of the civilized earth. Even the false reports, which declared that he was privately married already, and on bad terms with his wife, slandered him cordially under the popular name. And his intimate companions, when they alluded among each other to a romance in his life which would remain a hidden romance to the end of his days, forgot that the occasion justified a serious and severe use of his surname, and blamed him affectionately as 'poor dear Dick.'
The hour was midnight; and the friends, whom the most hospitable of men delighted to assemble round his dinner-table, had taken their leave with the exception of one guest specially detained by the host, who led him back to the dining-room.
'You were angry with our friends,' Dick began, 'when they asked you about that report of your marriage. You won't be angry with Me. Are you really going to be the old maid's husband?'
This plain question received a plain reply: 'Yes, I am.'
Dick took the young lord's hand. Simply and seriously, he said: 'Accept my congratulations.'
Howel Beaucourt started as if he had received a blow instead of a compliment.
'There isn't another man or woman in the whole circle of my acquaintance,' he declared, 'who would have congratulated me on marrying Miss Dulane. I believe you would make allowances for me if I had committed murder.'
'I hope I should,' Dick answered gravely. 'When a man is my friend—murder or marriage—I take it for granted that he has a reason for what he does. Wait a minute. You mustn't give me more credit than I deserve. I don't agree with you. If I were a marrying man myself, I shouldn't pick an old maid—I should prefer a young one. That's a matter of taste. You are not like me.
Beaucourt was not unworthy of the friendship he had inspired. 'I should be ungrateful indeed,' he said, 'if I didn't tell you what my object is. You know that I am poor?'
'The only poor friend of mine,' Dick remarked, 'who has never borrowed money of me.'
Beaucourt went on without noticing this. 'I have three expensive tastes,' he said. 'I want to get into Parliament; I want to have a yacht; I want to collect pictures. Add, if you like, the selfish luxury of helping poverty and wretchedness, and hearing my conscience tell me what an excellent man I am. I can't do all this on five hundred a year—but I can do it on forty times five hundred a year. Moral: marry Miss Dulane.'
Listening attentively until the other had done, Dick showed a sardonic side to his character never yet discovered in Beaucourt's experience of him.
'I suppose you have made the necessary arrangements,' he said. 'When the old lady releases you, she will leave consolation behind her in her will.'
'That's the first ill-natured thing I ever heard you say, Dick. When the old lady dies, my sense of honor takes fright, and turns its back on her will. It's a condition on my side, that every farthing of her money shall be left to her relations.'
'Don't you call yourself one of them?'
'What a question! Am I her relation because the laws of society force a mock marriage on us? How can I make use of her money unless I am her husband? and how can she make use of my title unless she is my wife? As long as she lives I stand honestly by my side of the bargain. But when she dies the transaction is at an end, and the surviving partner returns to his five hundred a year.'
Dick exhibited another surprising side to his character. The most compliant of men now became as obstinate as
