His wife was a pretty, gentle woman, of suitable age and character.  He was forty-two, she thirty-five.  He was loud and decided; she soft and yielding.  They had two children; or rather, I should say, she had two; for the elder, a girl of eleven, was Mrs Openshaw’s child by Frank Wilson, her first husband.  The younger was a little boy, Edwin, who could just prattle, and to whom his father delighted to speak in the broadest and most unintelligible Lancashire dialect, in order to keep up what he called the true Saxon accent.

Mrs Openshaw’s Christian name was Alice, and her first husband had been her own cousin.  She was the orphan niece of a sea-captain in Liverpool; a quiet, grave little creature, of great personal attraction when she was fifteen or sixteen, with regular features and a blooming complexion.  But she was very shy, and believed herself to be very stupid and awkward; and was frequently scolded by her aunt, her own uncle’s second wife.  So when her cousin, Frank Wilson, came home from a long absence at sea, and first was kind and protective to her; secondly, attentive; and thirdly, desperately in love with her, she hardly knew how to be grateful enough to him.  It is true, she would have preferred his remaining in the first or second stages of behaviour; for his violent love puzzled and frightened her.  Her uncle neither helped nor hindered the love affair, though it was going on under his own eyes.  Frank’s stepmother had such a variable temper, that there was no knowing whether what she liked one day she would like the next, or not.  At length she went to such extremes of crossness that Alice was only too glad to shut her eyes and rush blindly at the chance of escape from domestic tyranny offered her by a marriage with her cousin; and, liking him better than any one in the world, except her uncle (who was at this time at sea), she went off one morning and was married to him, her only bridesmaid being the housemaid at her aunt’s.  The consequence was that Frank and his wife went into lodgings, and Mrs Wilson refused to see them, and turned away Norah, the warm-hearted housemaid, whom they accordingly took into their service.  When Captain Wilson returned from his voyage he was very cordial with the young couple, and spent many an evening at their lodgings, smoking his pipe and sipping his grog; but he told them, for quietness’ sake, he could not ask them to his own house; for his wife was bitter against them.  They were not, however, very unhappy about this.

The seed of future unhappiness lay rather in Frank’s vehement, passionate disposition, which led him to resent his wife’s shyness and want of demonstrativeness as failures in conjugal duty.  He was already tormenting himself, and her too in a slighter degree, by apprehensions and imaginations of what might befall her during his approaching absence at sea.  At last, he went to his father and urged him to insist upon Alice’s being once more received under his