Sebastian and Emma Shepley began their married life in a little house in Jermyn Street—‘small,’ as Emma would have described it, ‘but genteel.’ It would be impossible to exaggerate the pride and pleasure which Emma had in the arrangements of her house, and in the fact that she was married to the (to her) finest and dearest of men; but to Sebastian marriage appeared in a very different light. For him it showed as the end of Youth, the voluntary rejection of romance, the light of common day. He had reasoned himself into it; acknowledging (and the man who does this need never call himself young again) that he had better take what he could get and be thankful for it. He had laid Passion in the grave; and, turning away, he met Life with her resolute face waiting for him inexorable as of old. Marriage was probably the first and most prudent step he could take, and Emma was fond of him, and Emma, after all, was pretty. A home, a wife, children—these solid anchors of the soul, presented themselves almost invitingly to his fancy after a time—and farewell to Love and Youth! In these curiously differing moods of mind Emma and Sebastian entered into the estate of matrimony—Sebastian with his eyes open, Emma with hers firmly shut. ‘Can two walk together except they be agreed?’ asks that eternally unanswerable book the Bible. Not comfortably, certainly, but they can halt along somehow, far out of step it may be, yet on the same road. I am afraid that when all was said and done the walk of Emma and Sebastian was somewhat after this halting kind. For Emma had not been married for many weeks before she began to see how curiously she disagreed from Sebastian on almost every point. Strange is the glamour of love that she had not found this out sooner! It said something for both of them that after having made the discovery Emma continued to love her husband as much as ever—only, the glamour was gone now. He had been to her a faultless romantic hero, she found him to be a man with several pronounced faults, who frequently offended her taste, who constantly opposed her, who plainly told her that he had once loved another woman, and loved her memory still.