All the parties given by Mr. Grey at the Manor House were men's parties. Mrs. Grey rarely or never was to be found in the drawing-room after dinner; and, indeed, the drawing-room was seldom lighted up. Mrs. Grey was a pretty, low-sized, dark-eyed, nervous woman, a few years the junior of her husband. He had met her first in London, in a house where she was staying on a visit with friends. She was alone in the world, had a small fortune, which, while it made her no object of pursuit in the circle she frequented, kept her independent. There was a little mystery and a little doubt about her, and while neither the mystery nor the doubt was sufficient to disquiet anyone, it served to keep interest in her alive, and the more prudent and calculating of suitors from love-making. Individually she was popular; but while those who knew her spoke well of her in her absence, the good things said of her always began in superlatives, and, as the conversation went on, diminished to positives, and the talk usually ended with a vague "but" and an unfinished sentence. Perhaps she was a little odd, they said. Perhaps she had French blood in her veins. Perhaps the strange blood was Spanish. She had a look not wholly English--a look denoting no close kinship with any other people. Her name was Muir, which seemed to indicate that she came of a stock north of the Tweed. Yet she had never been in Scotland, nor her father before her, nor anyone of his side, as far as he could trace back. Her mother had been the daughter of a Truro solicitor, her father a member of the Equity bar of London. Those who had known her father and mother declared that she resembled neither in her face nor her manner. She was dark, low-sized, and odd; they had both been tall, fair, and models of conventional insipidity. When Henry Walter Grey married Miss Muir she was twenty-four years of age, he twenty-nine. The women judged her to be thirty-four, the men allowed that she might be twenty-seven; but all agreed that young Grey, with his prospects, might have done much better as far as money went. But among the young and the chivalric of Daneford, young Grey helped forward his nascent popularity by marrying a poor wife and risking his father's displeasure for his sweetheart's sake. The young and chivalric of Daneford were never tired of pointing to the pleasantest and most prosperous man in the city as one who had made his love paramount above all other considerations in the selection of a wife.