The young orator was not unconscious of the interest he excited. Bright eyes told their tale, and the whole-hearted applause that greeted his rhetorical flourishes could not escape attention at close quarters. Fair and refined in face, with fine, wavy light hair, the girl afforded a striking contrast to this forceful, dark-skinned man of the people; but they were drawn to each other by those magnetic sympathies which carry wireless messages from heart to heart. It would be too much to say that he fell in love with her at first sight. Had they never met again, mutual first impressions might have worn off; but they did meet again, and yet again. Coming to her employer's house on some political business, young Jardine encountered the girl in the hall, and she frankly gave him her hand--blushingly and with a word or two of thanks for the speech which had seemed to her so eloquent. After that, in the grimy streets of Walsall and in various public places, the acquaintance ripened, until one winter day, outside the town, she startled him with an unusually earnest "good-bye." The children she had taught were going away to school; she, too, was going away--whither she knew not. "Don't go," he said, slowly; "don't go. Stay and marry me." She was almost alone in the world, and shuddering at the grey prospect of her life. Besides, she loved him, or at least believed she did. Within a month they were married at the registrar's office. Nicholas Jardine did not hold with any church or chapel observances. After the banal ceremony of the civil law, he took his bride to London for a week. Then they returned to Walsall. His means were of the scantiest; they lived in a little five-roomed house, with endless tenements of the same mean type and miserable material stretching right and left. The conditions of life, after the first glamour faded, were dreary and soul-subduing. All the women in Warwick Road knew or wanted to know their neighbour's business; all resented 'uppish' airs on the part of any particular resident. They were of the ordinary type, those neighbours, kindly, slatternly, given to gossip. Mrs. Jardine was not, and did not look like, one of them. She was sincerely desirous of doing her duty in that drab state of life in which she found herself, but she wholly failed to please her neighbours, whose quarrels she heard through the miserable plaster walls, or witnessed from over the road. Worse than that, she found with dismay, as time went on, that she did not wholly please her husband. She was conscious of a gloomy sense of disappointment on his part; and she, though bravely resisting the growing feeling, knew in her heart that disillusionment had fallen upon herself. The recurrent coarseness of the man's ideas and expressions jarred upon her nerves. His way of eating, sleeping, and carrying himself, in their cramped domestic circle, constantly offended her fastidious tastes.