Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and he left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have injured.  With this and a husband already distinguished, she returned presently to London, and was on the whole fairly well received there.

It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this divorce fell.  There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that a schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more valuable proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in England is against any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity.  And also Mr. Benham remarried.  It would certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a sister.  His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only hastened its decay.  Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with increasing frequency to the times.  He expended a considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury, to the school equipment.  None of these things did anything but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife’s escapade had created in the limited opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed.  One boy who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the Zend-avesta to an irascible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn without notice or compensation in the middle of the term.  It intensifies the tragedy of the Reverend Harold Benham’s failure that in no essential respect did his school depart from the pattern of all other properly-conducted preparatory schools.

In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English gentlemen.  He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high forehead.  His rather tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses.  He was an active man in unimportant things, with a love for the phrase “ship-shape,” and he played cricket better than any one else on the staff.  He walked in wide strides, and would sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard.  Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had early distrusted his natural impulse in conversation, and had adopted the defensive precaution of a rather formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made a part of him.  His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy