Her history was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired, ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying his employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. Stillwood's attention to the girl by boxing her ears for having, as he passed, slapped his face with a convenient sprat. Stillwood, acting on the impulse of the moment, had taken the child by the hand and dragged her, unwilling, to her father's place of business--a small coal shed in the Horseferry Road. The arrangement he there made amounted practically to the purchase of the child. She was sent abroad to school and the coal shed closed. On her return, ten years later, a big, handsome young woman, he married her, and learned at leisure the truth of the old saying, “what's bred in the bone will come out in the flesh,” scrub it and paint it and hide it away under fine clothes as you will. Her constant complaint against her husband was that he was only a solicitor, a profession she considered vulgar; and nothing “riled” old Gadley more than hearing her views upon this point. “It's not fair to the gals,” I once heard her say to him. I was working in the next room, with the door not quite closed, added to which she talked at the top of her voice on all subjects. “What real gentleman, I should like to know, is going to marry the daughter of a City attorney? As I told him years ago, he ought to have retired and gone into the House.” “The very thing your poor father used to talk of doing whenever things were going a bit queer in the retail coal and potato business,” grunted old Gadley. Mrs. Stillwood called him a “low beast” in her most aristocratic tones, and swept out of the room. Not that old Stillwood himself ever expressed fondness for the law. “I am not at all sure, Kelver,” I remember his saying to me on one occasion, “that you have done wisely in choosing the law. It makes one regard humanity morally as the medical profession regards it physically:--as universally unsound. You suspect everybody of being a rogue. When people are behaving themselves, we lawyers hear nothing of them. All we hear of is roguery, trickery and hypocrisy. It deteriorates the character, Kelver. We live in a perpetual atmosphere of transgression. I sometimes fancy it may be infectious.” “It does not seem to have infected you, sir,” I replied; for, as I think I have already mentioned, the firm of Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal was held in legal circles as the synonym for rectitude of dealing quite old-fashioned. “I hope not, Kelver, I hope not,” the old gentleman replied; “and yet, do you know, I sometimes suspect myself--wonder if I may not perhaps be a scamp without realising it. A rogue, you know, Kelver, can always explain himself into an honest man to his own satisfaction. A scamp is never a scamp to himself.”