I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft, monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless--an angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits. At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect--one thing in especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the detectives. CHAPTER II. I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION Lord Skene was, as things go, a poor man--poor for an ex-judge, and poor for a nobleman. His estate was much embarrassed at the time when his lady started a resolution to nurse it. It was reduced then to the mansion and demesne of Evercreech, a fair enough property in its way, but largely neglected, and, in places, fallen to waste. I think that even her ladyship’s management could do little more than preserve it to the succession--a vain economy, it seemed; but the seed of woman is hope. Much before her time the house in Berkeley Square had been let away on a lengthy lease; and a family hotel must serve her and my lord on their periodic visits to town.