Miss Agatha Lawrence had turned up her aristocratic nose at him, as a rather coarse and self-assured person, as proud of his want of education as other men were of its acquirement. Now he was about forty, stout, high-colored, loud of voice, and with an important swagger. But money had given "our enterprising citizen" power, and he both understood and wielded it skilfully. His wife had been dead barely six months, but when he met Irene Lawrence he decided at once that the penniless beauty would be only too glad to marry him. He was proud to think he could afford to be so magnanimous. Mrs. Minor settled herself to the fact that there must be no foolish dallying. Of course Irene _would_ see. She could not be so idiotically, so fatally blind! I do not know that at this period of her life Irene Lawrence had any ideal. She had made conquests so easily, she had found men so much alike, and in her secret heart she despised them for being so ready to kneel and bow at beauty's shrine. It seemed to her as if youth and fortune were alike boundless; and she literally took no thought for the morrow, until the tidings of her father's death was followed by the subsequent news of loss of fortune. If George Eastman had a self-conviction that he and his cousin had contributed to this downfall, he tried to make it up to Irene in brotherly kindness and generous expenditure where money was concerned. He solaced himself with the thought that, after all, he had no more than his own, or what should have been his own rightfully, though he fancied he could not have gone on to the end quite as Horace had. When Sir Christopher Frodsham came across the two ladies in Paris, Gertrude exulted at the easy conquest. A man of fifty, whose young years and health had been spent in sowing a plentiful crop of wild oats, but to whom had come now, quite unexpectedly, a fortune and a title; and prosperity, after years of rather bitter economy, made him miserly, as it not unfrequently does such men. That he would have been glad to marry this young, beautiful girl, for himself alone, was most true. And Irene, in the bewilderment of the losses, inclined to his proposal, and begged time for consideration. He was not a man she could admire, respect, or love. He was narrow, egotistical, selfish, and with the pitiful vanity of a worn-out _roué_. Frodsham Park was in a lonely, mountainous part of England, bordering on Wales; and this man would look upon his wife as a nurse and companion, and the mother of an heir.