Mrs. Norcott had been five years a widow, and her only surviving child was eighteen when she decided--chiefly that he might have the advantage of a stepfather’s counsel and control--to marry again. The step, unfortunately, did not prove a successful one. Frederick Norcott from the first “set himself,” as the nurses say, against his medicine; and Mr. Baker--a sensible, unassuming, but quietly proud man--did not persevere in the up-hill work imposed upon him. Happily Mrs. Baker’s jointure, with the addition of the small but comfortable patrimony, on the strength of which the retired solicitor had ventured on aspiring to the hand of the still handsome Mrs. Norcott, were safe from the all-devouring maw of her reckless and selfish son. To what extent he had in secret, and without even the knowledge of her less-easy-to-be-persuaded husband, mulcted the anxious woman of her little-prized gold, no one but the greedy spendthrift and his unselfish parent could have told. For years, whether at home or abroad, in the army or out of it, in youth and in middle-age, this only son of one of the best of women had never ceased being to her a source of trouble and of trial. Her most peaceful days concerning him had been those which had elapsed since his marriage, since for more than twelve months there had been no call upon her purse, no appeal to her motherly sympathy for distresses which she had at last begun to believe were frequently fictitious. On Fred’s return to England, which event occurred about a year before his introduction to the reader, Mrs. Baker had made, with some satisfaction, the acquaintance of her son’s wife. The colonial so-called heiress, was a _fade_, sentimental, well-meaning woman; very much inclined to worship the husband who in birth and breeding was so greatly her superior, and little disposed to regret the loss through advancing years of such small claims to beauty as nature had endowed her with.