Buncombe should be free to follow her own walk in life, with a moderate allowance to supplement what she could earn.  That was five years ago.  Mrs. Buncombe now sang at second-rate halls, and enjoyed a certain popularity, which seemed to her an ample justification of the independence she had claimed.  She was just thirty, tolerably good-looking, and full of the enjoyment of life.  Her children, originally left in the care of her mother, whom Buncombe supported, were now looked after by the two servants of the house, and Buncombe seemed to have no conscientious troubles on that score; to Harvey Rolfe’s eye it was plain that the brother and sister were growing up as vicious little savages, but he permitted himself no remark on the subject.

After a few conversations, he gained an inkling of Buncombe’s motive in taking a house so much larger than he needed.  This magnificence was meant as an attraction to the roaming wife, whom, it was clear, Buncombe both wished and hoped to welcome back before very long.  She did occasionally visit the house, though only for an hour or two; just to show, said Buncombe, that there was no ill-feeling.  On his part, evidently, there was none whatever.  An easy-going, simple-minded fellow, aged about forty, with a boyish good temper and no will to speak of, he seemed never to entertain a doubt of his wife’s honesty, and in any case would probably have agreed, on the least persuasion, to let bygones be bygones.  He spoke rather proudly than otherwise of Mrs. Buncombe’s artistic success.

‘It isn’t every woman could have done it, you know, Mr. Rolfe.’

‘It is not,’ Harvey assented.

Only those rooms were furnished which the little family used, five or six in all; two or three stood vacant, and served as playgrounds for the children in bad weather.  Of his relatives at the top, Buncombe never spoke; he either did not know, or viewed with indifference, the fact that Mrs. Handover served his lodger in a menial capacity.  About once a month he invited three or four male friends to a set dinner, and hilarity could be heard until long after midnight.  Altogether it was a strange household, and, as he walked about the streets of the neighbourhood, Harvey often wondered what abnormalities even more striking might be concealed behind the meaningless uniformity of these heavily respectable housefronts.  As a lodger he was content to dwell here; but sometimes by a freak of imagination he pictured himself a married man, imprisoned with wife and children amid these leagues of dreary, inhospitable brickwork, and a great horror fell upon him.

No.  In his time he had run through follies innumerable, but from the supreme folly of hampering himself by marriage, a merciful fate had guarded him.  It was probably the most remarkable fact of his life; it heightened his self-esteem, and appeared to warrant him in the assurance that a destiny so protective would round the close of his days with tranquillity and content.