Now it's an odd thing that the chief difficulty which confronted me was one of which most men would have thought nothing at all. I'd a wife and children. They're possessions of which plenty of men would be glad to get relieved. I didn't happen to be one of them. I've tried all sorts of things. I've had plenty of money. I've been in some queer corners of the world, and seen some queer capers, and done them. There are games I can play, at which no man can hold his own with me; nor yet begin. But there's only one thing which doesn't taste nasty in my mouth. And that's my wife. She's the only thing I ever came across that was quite worth having; and, my God, she is. It's a complete illustration of life's little ironies that I should have been the man to have got her; for though she doesn't know it, inside and out we're as unlike each other as the poles are far asunder. During the last six years it had been one of my chief ends and aims not to let her find it out. And she hadn't--to that hour. Now what was going to happen? In this game which I was starting on, where did she come in? If I'd laid myself out to play it on different lines from the first, she might have been the Marchioness of Twickenham. Jimmy, when his turn came, might have been a peer of the realm. And yet I didn't know. That would have been to have smirched her with my brush. If I ever was bowled out, which was a prospect I always had to face, they'd possibly try to make out, and would certainly think, that she'd been in the know with me. That would be as death to Mary. The more I thought it over the more it seemed to me that that cock wouldn't fight. Apart from the fact that I meant, as the Marquis of Twickenham, to disavow all connection with Mr. Montagu Babbacombe, who had behaved so basely in deluding Mr. Howarth, it was obvious to me that it would still be the better policy to keep Mary out of my ditches, and without the knowledge of their existence. I always had lived, as all men do, and, I suppose, most women, a double, treble, or quadruple life, as circumstances required. For a little arrangement of that sort, in the future, I should be better placed than ever. I only had to remove the lady from Little Olive Street, and ask her to acquaint no one with her new address. She need never know me as anything but James. As the Marquis I should be entitled to my little eccentricities; his lordship always had indulged in them. And after an absence of fifteen years, no one could cavil if I still continued to disappear whenever the humour took me. Mr. and Mrs. Merrett would have a better time together than they had ever had before. CHAPTER XXII A MARQUIS IN FACT