As soon as John Lorraine saw the tide of fortune strongly setting in, he took to himself a wife, the daughter of one of his City friends, a man of tolerable wealth and great experience, who in his early days had befriended the struggling boy, and who thought his daughter could not have achieved higher honour or greater happiness. Whatever honour or happiness may have accrued to the young lady on her marriage did not last long, for, shortly after giving birth to her first child, a daughter, she died; and thenceforward John Lorraine devoted his life to the little girl, and to the increased fortune which she was to inherit. When little Jane had arrived at a more than marriageable age, and from a pretty fubsy baby had grown into a thin, acidulated, opiniated woman (a result attributable to the manner in which she had been spoiled by her indulgent father), John Lorraine's mind was mainly exercised as to what manner of man would propose for her with a likelihood of success. Hitherto, love-affairs had been things almost unknown to his Jane, not from any unwillingness on her part to make their acquaintance, but principally because, notwithstanding the fortune which it was known she would bring to her husband, none of the few young men who from time to time dined solemnly in the old-fashioned house in Brunswick-square, or acted as cavalier to its mistress to the Antient Concerts, or the King's Theatre, could make up their minds to address her in anything but the most common phrases. That Miss Jane had a will of her own, and a tart manner of expressing her intention of having that will fulfilled, was also matter of common gossip. Stories were current among the clerks at Mincing-lane of the "wigging" which they had heard her administering to her father, when she drove down to fetch him away in her chariot, and when he kept her unduly waiting; the household servants in Brunswick-square had their opinion of Miss Jane's temper; and the tradesmen in the neighbourhood looked forward to the entrance of her thin, dark figure into their shops every Tuesday morning, for the performance of settling the books, with fear and trembling.