On one point he did not delude himself as he looked back over his life. He had no sentimental regrets for the careless happiness of youth. Is any period of human life so tormented with cares as a self-indulgent youth? He had been a slave to expensive habits, to social traditions, to past follies, ever since he could remember. He had been in debt, in pocket or in conscience, from his schoolboy days to this hour. His tradesmen were paid long since, and, if death had cancelled what else he owed, how easy virtue would henceforth be! It had not been easy at the date of his first marriage. He was deeply in debt, and out of favor with his father. It was on both accounts that he went abroad for some months. In Holland he married. His wife was Jan’s mother, and Jan was their only child. Her people were of middle rank, leading quiet though cultivated lives. Her mother was dead, and she was her old father’s only child. It would be doing injustice to the kind of love with which she inspired her husband to dwell much upon her beauty, though it was of that high type which takes possession of the memory for ever. She was very intensely, brilliantly fair, so that in a crowd her face shone out like a star. Time never dimmed one golden thread in her hair; and Death, who had done so much for Mr. Ford’s client, could not wash that face from his brain. It blotted the traffic out of the streets, and in their place Dutch pastures, whose rich green levels were unbroken by hedge or wall, stretched flatly to the horizon. It bent over a drawing on his knee as he and she sat sketching together in an old-world orchard, where the trees bore more moss than fruit. The din of London was absolutely unheard by Mr. Ford’s client, but he heard her voice, saying, “You must learn to paint cattle, if you mean to make any thing of Dutch scenery. And also, where the earth gives so little variety, one must study the sky. We have no mountains, but we have clouds.” It was in the orchard, under the apple-tree, across the sketch-book, that they had plighted their troth—ten years ago. They were married. Had he ever denied himself a single gratification, because it would add another knot to the tangle of his career? He had pacified creditors by incurring fresh debts, and had evaded catastrophes by involving himself in new complications all his life. His marriage was accomplished at the expense of a train of falsehoods, but his father-in-law was an unworldly old man, not difficult to deceive. He spent most of the next ten months in Holland, and, apart from his anxieties, it was the purest, happiest time he had ever known. Then his father recalled him peremptorily to England.