Yes, he had known Emily Jerningham before she became the wife of her wealthy kinsman; he had known her in the days of her genteel poverty--the patient daughter of a peevish valetudinarian. He had been allied with this poorer branch of the Jerningham family by friendships and associations of many years’ standing, and had never spent a week in Paris without paying more than one visit to the shabby, little furnished-house at Passy, in which Philip Jerningham dragged out the tiresome remnant of his useless existence with Emily for his companion and nurse, his secretary, butler, and steward. He had come at first prompted by a kindly feeling for the friend of his dead father; he came afterwards for his own pleasure; and those flying visits to Paris, which had been wont to occur two or three times in the year, began to repeat themselves at very short intervals. He had fallen in love with Emily Jerningham, and he had sufficient reason for believing that his love was returned. Those evenings in the little flower-garden at Passy were the happiest hours of his busy life. The paradise was very prim and dusty and arid, and all the roar and clamour of Paris thundered a hoarse chorus in the distance; but it was Eden, nevertheless; and when, a few years afterwards, he wasted an idle hour by going to look at the old place, he was surprised to discover what a shabby scene it was, now that the glamour had departed from it. He was a proud man, and it was his misfortune to live in a world in which the splendour and luxuries of the million were accounted the necessities of existence. The women he met were women who would have been panic-stricken if they had found themselves on foot and alone in a crowded London street. They were women who, if suddenly reduced to the depths of poverty, would have thought the delf-plates and mugs of destitution a greater hardship than its bread and water. They were delicate creatures--“not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food,” but quite unable to cope with human nature’s pecuniary embarrassments. They were creatures who thought that a cheque-book went on for ever, like the Laureate’s brook: and that so long as there were any of those nice oblong slips of paper left in the world, papas and husbands and brothers had nothing to do but to sign their names at the bottom of them.