He had been staying at Brighton, at a grand hotel, and there he had made the acquaintance of a wealthy merchant, an old widower, with an only daughter, for whose hand and heart he had already commenced angling. The father was chatty and cheerful in the smoking-room, of one of the Brighton clubs, and the girl, if she had not the birth of a lady, had all the accomplishments of one. She was not romantic, few girls nowadays are. She was not a philosopher in petticoats, as so many of them try to be. She read novels, could quote Tennyson, had the usual accomplishments, never failed to put in an appearance at a fashionable church on a Sunday, and had once or twice figured at a stall at a charity bazaar. Her figure looked well on horseback, and did not disgrace a Belgravian ball-room. It was to her credit that she had not attempted authorship. She was not a bad hand at a charade, and was a proficient in lawn tennis, where one weak curate after another had succumbed to her charms. Poor fellows, they singed their wings in vain at that candle. Neither father nor daughter was ecclesiastically inclined. In addition, she had had the measles and been vaccinated and confirmed, and was ambitious of worldly success. ‘Just a woman to make a lady of,’ said the Baronet to himself, as he watched her receding figure one morning as she was on her way to Brill’s Baths for a swimming lesson. ‘They tell me the old man has no end of tin, and this is his only child.’ He met the Baronet half way. When Sir William Holles, the son of that Sir William Holles, Lord Mayor of London, and Alderman of Candlewick Ward, and knighted by Henry VIII., was recommended by his friends to marry his daughter to the Earl of Cumberland, he replied: ‘Sake of God’ (his usual mode of expression), ‘I do not like to stand with my cap in hand to my son-in-law. I will see her married to an honest gentleman with whom I may have friendship and conversation.’ Sir Watkin relieved the London merchant of any apprehension on that score, when, one day, he managed to dine in his company. It was wonderful how well they got on together. Sir Watkin talked of stocks and shares, of foreign loans and the rate of exchange, of hostile tariffs, of the fall of this house and the rise of another, of aldermen and lord mayors, as if he had been a City man himself. It is true this talk is rather dull, but Sir Watkin was not brilliant by any means. Back in town the Baronet felt rather dull. Such men often are dull. Time hangs heavily on the hands of such.