Harrington Dalbrook was as keenly impressed with a sense of stupendous self-sacrifice in giving up his prospects in the Church as if the Primacy had only been a question of time; yet as his Divinity examination had twice ended in disappointment and a shamefaced return to the paternal roof-tree, it might be thought that, in his friend Sir Henry Baldwin’s phraseology, he was very well out of it. Sir Henry was the average young man of the epoch, sharp, shallow, and with a strong belief in his own superiority to the human race in general, and naturally to a friend whose father plodded over leases and agreements in an old-fashioned office in a country town; but the two young men happened to have been thrown together at Oxford, where Sir Henry was at Christ Church while Harrington Dalbrook was at New; and as Sir Henry’s ancestral home was within six miles of Dorchester, the friendship begun at the University was continued in the county town. Sir Henry lived at a good old Georgian house called the Mount, between Dorchester and Weymouth. It was a red brick house, with a centre and two wings, a Corinthian portico of Portland stone, and a wide level lawn in front of the portico, that was brilliant with scarlet geraniums all the summer. There were no novelties in the way of gardening at the Mount, and there were never likely to be any new departures while Lady Baldwin held the reins of power. She was known in the locality as a lady of remarkable “closeness,” a lady who pared down every department of expenditure to the very bone. The gardens and shrubberies were always in perfect order, neat, trim, weedless; but everything was reduced to the minimum of outlay; there were no new plants or shrubs, no specimen trees, no innovations or improvements; there was very little “glass,” and there were only two gardeners to do the work in grounds for which most people would have kept four or five. The dowager was never ashamed to allude to the smallness of her jointure or to bemoan her son’s college debts. She had two daughters, the younger pale, sickly, and insignificant; the elder tall and large, with a beauty of the showy and highly-coloured order, brown eyes, a complexion of milk and roses, freely sprinkled with freckles, and light wavy hair, which in a young woman of meaner station might have been called red. The neighbourhood was of opinion that it was time for the elder Miss Baldwin to marry, and that she ought to marry well; but that important factor in marriage, the bridegroom, was not forthcoming. It was a ground of complaint against Sir Henry that he never brought any eligible young men to the Mount. “My mother’s housekeeping would frighten them away if I did,” answered Henry, when hard driven upon this point. “The young men of the present day like a good dinner. There isn’t a third-rate club in London where the half-crown house dinner isn’t better than the food we have here—better cooked and more plentiful.”