The living of Baddesley-with-Arden was one of those fat sinecures which are usually given to men of good family and considerable private means. The Reverend Marmaduke Ferrers was the descendant of a race well rooted in the soil, and had, by the demise of two bachelor uncles and three maiden aunts, accumulated to himself a handsome property, in land, and houses, and the safer kind of public securities. These legacies had fallen in at longish intervals, some of the aunts being slow in relaxing their grip upon this world’s gear; but had all the wealth of a Westminster or a Rothschild been poured into the Reverend Marmaduke’s lap, he would not have renounced the great tithes of Baddesley-with-Arden, or the important, and, in a manner, judicial and dictatorial position which he held as Rector of those two small parishes. Mr. Ferrers loved the exercise of authority on a small scale. He had an autocratic mind, but it was a very small mind, and it suited him to be the autocrat of two insignificant pastoral villages, rather than to measure his power against the men of cities. To hector Giles for getting drunk on a Saturday night, to lecture Joan for her absence from church on Sunday, afforded the Rector as much delight as a bigger man might have felt in towering over the riot of a Republican chamber or proroguing a Rump parliament. Mr. Ferrers had been Rector of Baddesley thirty years, and in all that time he had never once thought of taking to himself a wife. He had a lovely old Rectory and a lovelier garden; he had the best servants in the neighbourhood—partly because he was a most exacting master, and partly because he paid his housekeeper largely, and made her responsible for everybody else. The whole machinery of his life worked with a delightful smoothness. He had nothing to gain from matrimony in the way of domestic comfort; and there is always the possibility of loss. Thus it happened that although he had gone on admiring Miss Lawford for a round dozen years, talking of her as a most ladylike and remarkably well-informed person, pouring all his small grievances into her ear, confiding to her the most recondite details of any little complaint from which he happened to suffer, consulting her about his garden, his stable, his parish, it had never occurred to him that he should improve his condition or increase his happiness by making the lady his wife.