Mr. Chilverstone was one of those men upon whom many sorrows and disappointments are laid. He had set out in life with a choice selection of great ambitions, and at forty-five not one of them had fructified. Ill-health had always weighed him down in one direction; ill-luck in another; the only piece of good fortune which had ever come to him came when the Earl of Simonstower, who had heard of him as an inoffensive man content to serve a parish without going to extremes in either of the objectionable directions, presented him to a living which even in bad times was worth five hundred pounds a year. But just before this preferment came in his way Mr. Chilverstone had the misfortune to lose his wife, and the enjoyment of the fit things of a country living was necessarily limited to him for some time. He was not greatly taxed by his pastoral duties, for his flock, from the earl downwards, loved that type of parson who knows how to keep his place, and only insists on his professional prestige on Sundays and the appointed days, and he had no great inclination to occupy himself in other directions. As the bitterness of his great sorrow slipped away from him he found his life resolving itself into a level--his time was passed in reading, in pottering about his garden, and, as she grew up, in educating his only child, a girl who at the time of her mother’s death was little more than an infant. At the time of Lucian’s arrival in the village Mr. Chilverstone’s daughter was at school in Belgium--the boy’s first visits to the vicarage were therefore made to a silent and lonely house, and they proved very welcome to its master.