Old John Lorraine, fully appreciating his daughter's infirmities, though, partly from affection, partly from fear, he never took upon himself to rebuke them, began to think that the fairy prince who was to wake this morally slumbering virgin to a sense of something better, to larger views and higher aims, to domestic happiness and married bliss, would never arrive. He came at last, however, in the person of George Gurwood; a big, broad-shouldered, jovial fellow, who, as a son of another of Lorraine's early friends, had some time previously been admitted as a partner into the house. Everybody liked good-looking, jolly George Gurwood. Lambton Lorraine and Lowther Lorraine, who, though now growing elderly men, had retained their bachelor tastes and habits, and managed to get through a great portion of the income accruing to them from the business, were delighted with his jovial manners, his sporting tendencies, his convivial predilections. When the fact of George's paying his addresses to their niece was first promulgated, Lambton had a serious talk with his genial partner, warning him against tying himself for life to a woman with whom he had no single feeling in common. But George laughed at the caution, and declined to be guided by it. "Miss Lorraine was not much in his line," he said; "perhaps a little given to tea and psalm-smiting; but it would come all right: he should get her into a different way; and as the dear old guv'nor" (by which title George always affectionately spoke of his senior partner) "seemed to wish it he was not going to stand in the way. He wanted a home, and Jane should make him a jolly one, he'd take care of that." Jane Lorraine married George Gurwood, but she did not make him a home. Her rigid bearing and unyielding temper were too strong for his plastic, pliable nature; for many months the struggle for mastery was carried on between them, but in the end George--jolly George no longer--gave way. He had made a tolerably good fight of it, and had used every means in his power to induce her to be less bitter, less furtive, less inexorable in the matter of his dinings-out, his sporting transactions, his constant desire to see his table surrounded by congenial company. "I have tried to gentle her," he said to Lowther Lorraine one day, "as I would a horse, and there has never been one of them yet that I could not coax and pet into good temper; I'd spend any amount of money on her, and let her have her own way in most things if she would only just let me have mine in a few. I have tried her with a sharp bit and a pair of 'persuaders,' but that was no more use than the gentling. She's as hard as nails, Lowther, my boy, and I don't see my way out of it, that's the truth. So come along and have a B and S."