“Perhaps I was sentimental and foolish,” my mother would say, with that quiet, unemotional voice of hers which caused strangers to doubt whether she could ever be either, “but he had such beautiful eyes and played in such an unaffected, dreamy way. And he was so good,” she would add, as if this were the quality which in the end had impressed her most. “He might have been much better off than he was, only he never could do anything underhand or mean. I don’t think such things ever even tempted him. He was simply above them.” My father became a great favourite with the household till he committed the intolerable impertinence of falling in love with Miss Gascoyne. From the position of an ever welcome guest he descended to that of a “presuming little Jewish quill-driver,” as my uncle—whose friendship for him had always been of a somewhat patronising order—described him. In fact, my uncle was considerably more bitter in denouncing his presumption than my grandfather, who, his first irritation over, went so far as to suggest that the best should be made of a bad job, and that they should turn him into a lawyer, urging his nationality as a plea that his admission into the firm was not likely to do any harm. But my uncle was certainly right in receiving such a proposal with derision. “He hasn’t even got the qualities of his race,” he said—although this very fact had been, till their quarrel, a constantly reiterated argument in my father’s favour. My father and mother were forbidden to meet, and so one Sunday morning—Sunday being the only day on which my father could devote the whole day to so important an event—my mother stole out of the house and they were married before morning service, on a prospective income of a hundred a year. As mad a piece of sentimental folly as was ever perpetrated by a pair of foolish lovers. The strange thing was that they were happy. They loved one another devotedly, and my grandfather—though quite under the thumb of my uncle—surreptitiously paid the rent of the small house where they spent the whole of their married life, and which after a time, still unknown to my uncle, he bought for them. My uncle, whom even when I was a child I thought a singularly interesting man—and the estrangement was certainly one of the griefs of my mother’s life—had a great opinion of himself on account of the family from which he was derived. He made a point of having in readiness all proofs of his claim to the title in case the extraordinary event should happen of the intervening lives going out one after the other like a row of candles. His researches on the subject enabled him to show a respectable number of instances in which an heir even as distant as himself had succeeded.