This man--Hugh Eastin--had once thought that he would be a great musician, and many years of hard study had made him rather a distinguished one, within a limited field; but nothing had come of it. At the end of that time, in the impulsive way in which he did things, he had married, and of that marriage he was the victim. He did not say so to himself; perhaps he did not even know it; but the paralysis which had fastened on his mind and soul was directly the result of his marriage. It would hardly have been possible for him to realize this, as he had enthusiastically agreed with all his friends that he was an extraordinarily fortunate man to win for a wife the pretty, virtuous, healthy, good-tempered young girl, who was known to be the heiress of the neighborhood from which she came. Her father had manifested the ambition he had for his only child, by sending her off to the city to be educated, and she had not graduated at school before the young musician, who gave lessons to the advanced pupils, had seen and fallen in love with her, and had obtained her consent, as well at that of her father, to their marriage. The engagement might have been sufficiently long to give them an opportunity to discover their unfitness for each other, had it not been that the girl’s father died very suddenly. It was then decided that, as she had no near relations to be responsible for her, she should be married at once. The wedding was therefore hastened, and he found himself, almost before he could realize the change in the current of his life, settled at the obscure country place, which his wife resolutely determined never to leave, and all his dreams of foreign study, and achievement in his art were suddenly in ashes.