The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many _visés_ to the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date, Clapham had not seen him for six months or more. It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him. The message--Mother Carey’s--referring to this difficulty, had reached him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a _suppressio veri_; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.