“If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,
    Could more than drinking my cares compose,
  A cure for sorrow from sighs I’d borrow,
    And hope to-morrow would end my woes. 
  But as in wailing there’s nought availing,
    And Death unfailing will strike the blow,
  Then for that reason, and for a season,
    Let us be merry before we go.”

For Dick Talbot-Lowry, however, and many another like him, the merriment of his great-grandfather was indifferent compensation for the fact that his grandfather’s and his father’s consequent borrowings were by no means limited to cures for sorrow.  Mortgages, charges, younger children (superfluous and abhorrent to the Heaven-selected Head of a Family)—­all these had driven wedges deep into the Mount Music estate.  But, fortunately, a good-looking, long-legged, ex-Hussar need not rely exclusively on his patrimony, while matrimony is still within the sphere of practical politics.  When, at close on forty-one years of age (and looking no more than thirty), Dick left the Army, his next step was to make what was universally conceded to be “a very nice marriage,” and on the whole, regarding it from the impartial standpoint of Posterity, the universe may be said to have been justified in its opinion.

Lady Isabel Christian was the daughter of an English Earl, and she brought with her to Mount Music twenty thousand golden sovereigns, which are very nice things, and Lady Isabel herself was indisputably a nice thing too.  She was tall and fair, and quite pretty enough (as Dick’s female relatives said, non-committally).  She was sufficiently musical to play the organ in church (which is also a statement provided with an ample margin); she was a docile and devoted wife, a futile and extravagant house-keeper, kindly and unpunctual, prolific without resentment; she regarded with mild surprise the large and strenuous family that rushed past her, as a mountain torrent might rush past an untidy flower garden, and, after nearly fourteen years of maternal experience, she had abandoned the search for a point of contact with their riotous souls, and contented herself with an indiscriminate affection for their very creditable bodies.  Lady Isabel had—­if the saying may be reversed—­“les qualites de ses defauts,” and these latter could have no environment less critical and more congenial than that in which it had pleased her mother to place her.  It was right and fitting that the wife of the reigning Talbot-Lowry of Mount Music, should inevitably lead the way at local dinner-parties; should, with ladylike inaudibleness, declare that “this Bazaar” or “Village Hall” was open.  It was no more than the duty of Major Talbot-Lowry (D.L., and J.P.) to humanity, that his race should multiply and replenish the earth, and Lady Isabel had unrepiningly obliged humanity to the extent of four sons and two daughters.  Major Dick’s interest in the multiplication was, perhaps, more abstract than hers.