Before Archibald Mortomley's death he had, however, lived a sufficient number of years to leave some difficult problems for the solution of his next heir, if that next heir had, in addition to being a clever, chanced likewise to be a wise man. The two phrases are not inter-changeable. Archibald the second was not a wise man, and therefore he did not try to solve the problems; he accepted them. What his father had done seemed right in his eyes; and as his father had permitted himself to be governed by his wife, so he allowed himself to be ruled by his mother. Early in life the first Archibald Mortomley had a disappointment in love sufficient to wean his thoughts from matrimony till he was surely old enough never to have thought of it at all. Perhaps he did not think of it till the idea was suggested by a widow lady already the happy mother of one son. For this son and herself she was anxious to find a suitable home, and as no more eligible victim offered, she secured that home by marrying Mortomley. From the hour she did so she devoted herself to sounding his praises; and poor Mr. Mortomley, who in his modesty really believed she had thrown herself away upon him, would cheerfully have laid down his life to please her. Unhappily for him and those who were to come after she did not want him to do anything of the kind. She wanted him to live, she wanted him to push on her first-born; she wished him to see Archibald their son grow to manhood; she nursed, coddled, petted, flattered him to such good purpose that, although his will did not prove to have been made exactly in accordance with her secret desires, still he had lived long enough to indoctrinate his son with his own opinions, so that in effect the document which left the business and properties to Archibald junior and to herself only a life annuity proved a mere form. To all intents and purposes she and Richard, her eldest son, long married to a most disagreeable woman, had the ball at their feet. Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded, honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and vagabonds. Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.