gracious nature, courteous, tolerant, and sympathetic, which is more perfect without the sharpness of intellect. Nothing that was unkind was possible to her. She had no particular imagination in the common sense of the word, but she had a higher gift, the moral imagination (so to speak) which gave her an exquisite understanding of other people’s feelings, and made her incapable of any injury to them. This made Lady Markham the very ideal of a great lady. As for Sir William, he held his place more firmly than ever with such a partner by his side. They were the happiest couple in the county, as well as the most important. Not only did you meet the best of company at their house, but the sight of a husband and wife so devoted to each other was good for you, everybody said. They were proud of each other, as they had good reason to be: she listened to him as to an oracle, and his tender consideration for her was an example to all. Everything had gone well with the Markhams. They were rich, and naturally inheritances and legacies and successions of all kinds fell to them, which made them richer. Their children were the healthiest and most thriving children that had ever been seen. Alice promised to be almost as pretty as her mother, and Paul was _not_ short like Sir William. Thus fortune had favoured them on every side. About a year before the date of this history, a cloud--like that famous cloud no bigger than a man’s hand--had floated up upon the clear sky, almost too clear in unshadowed well-being, over this prosperous house. It was nothing--a thing which most people would have laughed at, a mere reminder that even the Markhams were not to have everything their own way. It was that Paul, a model boy at school, had suddenly become--wild? Oh no! not wild, that was not the word: indeed it was difficult to know what word to use. He had begun as soon as he went to Oxford by having opinions. He had not been six months there before he was known at the Union and had plunged into all the politico-philosophical questions afloat in that atmosphere of the absolute. This was nothing but what ought to have been in the son of a statesman; but unfortunately to everything his father believed and trusted, Paul took the opposite side. He took up the highest republican principles, the most absolute views as to the equality of the human race. That, though it somewhat horrified his mother and sister, produced at first very little effect upon Sir William, who laughed and informed his family that Johnny Shotover had held precisely the same views when he was an undergraduate, though now he was Lord Rightabout’s secretary and as sound a politician as it was possible to desire. “It is the same as the measles,” Sir William said. Paul, however, had a theoretical mind and an obstinate temper: he was too logical for life. As soon as he had come to the conviction that all men are equal, he took the further step which costs a great deal more,