George Howard was alone in the world. His mother had died early; his father went off when George was twenty, leaving him fortune enough to help him to make life as pleasant as he chose to make it for himself. He was advancing rapidly in his profession--law--and had made a host of friends when the collapse came. As is so often the case, his pride, instead of sustaining him, sank under the blow. Most probably, if the truth were told, the wound inflicted on his self-esteem rankled deeper than that which had killed his love. The thought that another man could succeed where George Howard had failed would have been gall and wormwood to him in any case; but when the object of rivalry was a woman's heart, and George Howard's were the rejected addresses, death would be a small word to express the consummation of that gentleman's misery; it was the annihilation of all that made life worth the living. "Howard the jilted," he seemed to read in everybody's eye, when perhaps not half a dozen persons knew anything about the affair. Jilted by a girl! How could a man recover such a blow? What was there in the wide world to fill up the void left in one when his mighty self shrank to such insignificant proportions? Common sense might have suggested that there was more than one woman in the world, and that there lay a deeper fund of love in the heart of a man than could be exhausted on the first girl he chanced to meet and admire. It might have suggested also that failure in love did not necessarily mean failure in matters which, after all, as far as the world outside of our little selves is concerned, are of far more importance than love. Man is not sent into this world for the one purpose of being "married and done for," as the phrase goes. But when did common sense find the ear of a lover, particularly of a lover rejected? So here was George Howard, clever enough, good-looking enough, and by no means a bad fellow, self-stranded on the barren sand-banks of life, with a short five-and-twenty years behind him, a future full of fair promise still before him, hugging a useless sorrow in silent sadness, and making that his bride.