It was at this period that I met again the hero and heroine who had so captivated my boyish fancy, and never shall I forget the shock of recognition. They seemed to have been transformed by some sort of metempsychosis-while-you-wait process. The Captain’s old buoyancy had given place to irritability pretending to be joviality—a miserable sham, practised exclusively for company. And this seemed to alarm his wife far more than his outbursts of drunken passion, for then she knew that the bully was uppermost, while the cunning of his pretended humour puzzled her, and kept her upon tenter-hooks, fearing what he might say or do. It was a miserable life for her, poor thing. She, who had lived her youth in luxury, and her early married life in comfort and amid brilliant social surroundings, was now compelled to endure every degradation that genteel poverty and social vagabondage could inflict. They were very poor, yet her good-for-nothing husband insisted upon an outward show of gentility which he had not the grace to support. He would drink in private and in public, he would debase his manhood, and bully his long-suffering wife, but he would drain the very scanty family purse to preserve a pretence of social position. The children were growing up, but little were they heeded, except as servants and errand-boys. Education befitting the sons and daughters of an “officer and gentleman” was out of the question; all the cash that could be squeezed out of the domestic exchequer was appropriated by the Captain for his personal expenses, his clothes, and his drink. Poor Mrs. Meek had to find clothing for the boys and girls as best she might, just as she had to keep the household going. For herself, one or two black silk dresses which had seen better days served her through years of humiliation. She had lost the semblance of gentility, and only tried to make herself look a little smarter when her husband rated her for forgetting her position. Her position, indeed!