Gold, opium, tobacco, and claret—these were the genii who watched over Zeus Gildersedge’s autumn years. He was mean in a cosmopolitan sense, save in the satisfying of his especial sins. In his youth and prime he had been a brisk swashbuckler in the mercenary wars of commerce. He had lived between the boards of his ledger, had married a wife, and begotten one child. He had buried the one and stood half in awe of the other. Now, at sixty, he lurked like a decapod in his solitary den, and stretched out his lean, hungry tentacles to grip rentals, dividends, and the like into his mercenary maw. A hard, flint-eyed old ragamuffin, tough for all his wine-bibbing, with a soul of leather and a heart of clay, he was never seen abroad save when he trudged five miles down-hill in his green coat and greasy hat to deposit pelf in the bank at Rilchester or to collect the rentals of sundry squalid cottages he owned in that town. You might see him on a Monday morning standing at cottage doors and ciphering solemnly in a dirty, little, blue-leaved ledger. He never gave away a halfpenny. If he favored any one with a letter, he never stamped the envelope. As for charities, he looked on them as the sentimental hobbies of a fond and spendthrift public. There was no parson in Christendom who could have wheedled a donation out of him, pleaded he ever so plausibly. It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire. Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the mind—avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.