But everything had fallen into perfect peace outside the house for years. Now and then, at long intervals, it might indeed be remarked in the course of a genealogical conversation such as many people love, that it was not known who Mrs. Trevanion the second had been. “His first wife was a Miss Warren, one of the Warrens of Warrenpoint. The present one--well, I don’t know who she was; they married abroad.” But that was all that now was ever said. It would be added probably that she was very handsome, or very nice, or quite _comme il faut_, and so her defect of parentage was condoned. Everything was harmonious, friendly, and comfortable outside. The county could not resist her fine manners, her looks, her quiet assumption of the place that belonged to her. But within doors Mrs. Trevanion soon came to know that no very peaceful life was to be expected. There were people who said that she had not the look of a happy woman even when she first came home. In repose her face was rather sad than otherwise at all times. Mr. Trevanion was still in the hot fit of a bridegroom’s enthusiasm when he brought her home, but even then he was the most troublesome, the most exacting, the most fidgety of bridegrooms. Her patience with all his demands was boundless. She would change her dress half a dozen times in an evening to please him. She would start off with him on a sudden wild expedition at half an hour’s notice, without a word or even look of annoyance. And when the exuberance of love wore off, and the exactions continued, with no longer caresses and sweet words, but blame and reproach and that continual fault-finding which it is so hard to put up with amiably, Mrs. Trevanion still endured everything, consented to everything, with a patience that would not be shaken. It was now nearly ten years since the heart-disease which had brought him nearly to death’s door first showed itself. He had rheumatic fever, and then afterwards, as is so usual, this terrible legacy which that complaint leaves behind it. From that moment, of course, the patience which had been so sweetly exercised before became a religious duty. It was known in the house that nothing must cross or agitate or annoy Mr. Trevanion. But, indeed, it was not necessary that anything should annoy him; he was his own chief annoyance, his own agitator. He would flame up in sudden wrath at nothing at all, and turn the house upside down, and send everybody but his wife flying, with vituperations which scarcely the basest criminal could have deserved. And his wife, who never abandoned him, became the chief object of these passionate assaults. He accused her of every imaginable fault. He began to talk of all she owed him, to declare that he married her when she had nothing, that he had taken her out of the depths, that she owed everything to him; he denounced her as ungrateful, base, trying to injure his health under pretence of nursing him, that she might get the power into her own hands.