“History repeats itself,” said Preston Cheney meditatively to himself. “Alice is drawing this man into the net by her alarming physical condition, as Mabel riveted the chains about me when her mother died. “But Alice really loves the rector, I think, and she is capable of a much stronger passion than her mother ever felt; and the rector loves no other woman at least, and so this marriage, if it takes place, will not be so wholly wicked and unholy as mine was.” The marriage did take place three months later. Alice Cheney was not the wife whom Mrs Stuart would have chosen for her son, yet she urged him to this step, glad to place a barrier for all time between him and Joy Irving, whose possible return at any day she constantly feared, and whose power over her son’s heart she knew was undiminished. Alice Cheney’s family was of the best on both sides; there were wealth, station, and honour; and a step-grandmamma who could be referred to on occasions as “The Baroness.” And there was no skeleton to be hidden or excused. And Arthur Stuart, believing that Alice Cheney’s life and reason depended upon his making her his wife, resolved to end the bitter struggle with his own heart and with fate, and do what seemed to be his duty, toward the girl and toward his mother. When the wedding took place, the saddest face at the ceremony, save that of the groom, was the face of the bride’s father. But the bride was radiant, and Mabel and the Baroness walked in clouds. CHAPTER XVII ALICE did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her family, friends and physician had anticipated. She remained nervous, ailing and despondent. “Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much improved in health afterward,” the doctor said, and Mabel, remembering how true a similar prediction proved in her case, despite her rebellion against it, was not sorry when she knew that Alice was to become a mother, scarcely a year after her marriage. But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months passed by; and after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of the most hopeless kind. The best specialists in two worlds were employed to bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into which she had fallen, but all to no avail. At the end of two years, her case was pronounced hopeless. Fortunately the child died at the age of six weeks, so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs Lawrence was simply a case of “nerves,” growing into the plant hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the deadly fruit of insanity in Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to become extinct in the fourth generation. This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of spirit and health in Preston Cheney. Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney’s will-power lost its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with frightful speed.