Clive’s marriage was performed in Brussels, where Mr. James Binnie, who longed to see Rosey wedded, and his sister, whom we flippantly ventured to call the Campaigner, had been staying that summer.  After the marriage they went off to Scotland, and the Colonel and his son and daughter-in-law came to London—­not to the old bachelor quarters in Fitzroy Square, but to a sumptuous mansion in the Tyburnian district—­and one which became people of their station.  To this house came Mrs. Mackenzie when the baby was born, and there she stayed.

In a pique with the woman he loved, and from that generous weakness which led him to acquiesce in most wishes of his good father, the young man had gratified the darling wish of the Colonel’s heart, and taken the wife whom his old friends brought to him.  Rosey, who was also of a very obedient and docile nature, had acquiesced gladly enough in her mamma’s opinion, that she was in love with the rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or worse.

If Clive was gloomy and discontented even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, what was the young man’s condition in poverty, when they had no love along with a silent dinner of herbs; when his mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father ate—­when a vulgar, coarse-minded woman—­as Mrs. Mackenzie was—­pursued with brutal sarcasm one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the world; when an ailing wife, always under some one’s domination, received him with helpless hysterical cries and reproaches!

For a ghastly bankruptcy overwhelmed the Bundeleund Bank, and with its failure went all Colonel Newcome’s savings, and all Mrs. Mackenzie’s money and her daughter’s.  Even the Colonel’s pension and annuities were swallowed up in the general ruin, for the old man would pay every shilling of his debts.

When I ventured to ask the Colonel why Mrs. Mackenzie should continue to live with them—­“She has a right to live in the house,” he said, “it is I who have no right in it.  I am a poor old pensioner, don’t you see, subsisting on Rosey’s bounty.  We live on the hundred a year secured to her at her marriage, and Mrs. Mackenzie has her forty pounds of pension which she adds to the common stock.  They put their little means together, and they keep us—­me and Clive.  What can we do for a living?  Great God!  What can we do?”

But Clive was getting on tolerably well, at his painting, and many sitters came to him from amongst his old friends; he had work, scantily paid it is true, but work sufficient.  “I am pretty easy in my mind, since I have become acquainted with a virtuous dealer,” the painter assured me one day.  “I sell myself to him, body and soul, for some half dozen pounds a week.  I know I can get my money, and he is regularly supplied with his pictures.  But for Rosey’s illness we might carry on well enough.”

Rosey’s illness?  I was sorry to hear of that; and poor Clive, entering into particulars, told me how he had spent upon doctors rather more than a fourth of his year’s earnings.