Indeed, Eleanor Churchill's life had not been a particularly happy one. Daughter of a country clergyman near Bath, she lost both her parents before she was eighteen, and remained in the school where she was being "finished" after their death, giving her services as teacher for her board and lodging. Here she was seen and admired by Vance Churchill, who attended the school as drawing-master; a wild young fellow, full of talent, who worked (at intervals) like a horse, and whose splendid method of touching-up the pupils' drawings, so as to make them look all their own, redeemed many of his shortcomings, and caused him to be continued in favour at Minerva House. But when he fell in love with the pretty teacher, and muttered love to her as he was sharpening pencil-points, and was seen by the writing-master--an old person of seventy, who was jealous of his young _confrère_--to hand her a note in a copy of the _Laws of Perspective_, and on being taxed with his crime acknowledged it and gloried in it, it became impossible for the Miss Inderwicks, as the girls called them, or the Misses Inderwick, as they called themselves, to stand it any longer. So both the delinquents were discharged; and having nothing to live upon, they at once got married, and came up to London. Once there, Vance Churchill set to work with a will: he drew on wood, he lithographed, he drew languishing heads for the music-shops, and caricatures political and social; he finished several elaborate sketches in water-colour and in oil; but he sold scarcely any thing. There was not that demand for art in those days there is now, and consequently not that chance of livelihood for its possessors; and Vance Churchill and his young wife were very near to starvation indeed, and had buried one little girl-baby, who, had luxuries been provided for her, might have lived, when a small picture of Lady Macbeth, which had found a place in the Somerset-House Exhibition, was seen and purchased by Sir Jasper Wentworth, our old friend Sir Marmaduke's uncle and his predecessor in the baronetcy. From that time Vance Churchill's fortune was looked upon as made; for Sir Jasper, who had a nice eye for art, took him up, introduced him right and left, and got him commissions without end. Young Marmaduke, a free-spoken, jolly young man, coeval with the artist, took an immense fancy to him, and was never happy save in his society; money was, if not plentiful, always to be had,--and Eleanor Churchill was more wretched than she had ever been in the days of her direst poverty.