Poor, gentle, unsuspicious Sophy! She little guessed the troubled heart, the wearisomeness of spirit, on which the door of that spacious chamber closed when Arthur Vavasour went out from her presence. She loved the man who only liked, respected, _cared_ for her, with a passion almost equal to _his_ for the beautiful woman of whose very existence the trusting wife had ceased to think; loved him with a love which was rapidly superseding, crushing, nay well-nigh annihilating with its rapid and luxuriant growth the lowlier flowerets of a daughter’s tenderness--flowerets that had grown with her growth and strengthened with her strength till such time as the stronger seed was sown, the produce of which was destined, according to the law of nature, to suppress, if not indeed actually to destroy, the weaker herbage amongst which it had chanced to take root and flourish. Already was this girl, the child of a doting father, apologising for and more than half-regretting the presence of that father in the home which the old man’s excessive fondness for herself might render less agreeable to her husband; already she was giving to Arthur proofs, open and unrestrained, that he, and he alone, reigned paramount in her affections; and could the loving old man, to whom she was all in all, have looked into the young heart he thought he knew so well, the father would have learned there some very bitter truths. For the ignorance that was bliss to him, Andrew Duberly paid afterwards a heavy price. The wish to believe in what rendered him a happy man was father to the joyful thought that in his daughter’s affections her young and handsome husband held but a secondary place, and in that belief old Dub continued to his dying hour. But a day of reckoning--a day which, in the full flush, in the almost fever of his prime of bliss, the millionaire was far as are the poles asunder from anticipating--was, alas, very near at hand! The day of retribution for time misspent and wasted, for wealth abused, for golden opportunities neglected, for benefits unthankfully enjoyed, for--to sum up all--the myriad sins which render it no easy thing for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Yes, the day of retribution for the minor and unnoticed sins of this “just man” was near at hand; but in the mean time not a care oppressed him, nor did a single foreboding of evil to come mar his keen enjoyment of the present.