was well into middle age; increasing years made him yearn for the love of which his life had been starved; this craving would have been appeased by love for his daughter, but the truth was that he was repelled by the girl’s perfection.  She had never been known to lose her temper; not once had she shown the least preference for any of the eligible young men of her acquaintance; although always becomingly dressed, she was never guilty of any feminine foibles, which would have endeared her to her father.  To him, such correctness savoured of inhumanity; much of the same feeling affected the girl’s other relatives and friends, to the ultimate detriment of their esteem.

Hilda, Montague’s second wife, was the type of woman that successful industrialism turns out by the gross.  Sincere, well-meaning, narrow, homely, expensively but indifferently educated, her opinion on any given subject could be predicted; her childlessness accentuated her want of mental breadth.  She read the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward; she was vexed if she ever missed an Academy; if she wanted a change, she frequented fashionable watering-places.  She was much exercised by the existence of the “social evil”; she belonged to and, for her, subscribed heavily to a society professing to alleviate, if not to cure, this distressing ailment of the body politic.  She was the honorary secretary of a vigilance committee, whose operations extended to the neighbouring towns of Trowton and Devizeton.  The good woman was ignorant that the starvation wages which her husband’s companies paid were directly responsible for the existence of the local evil she deplored, and which she did her best to eradicate.

Miss Spraggs, Hilda Devitt’s elder sister, lived with the family at Melkbridge House.  She was a virgin with a taste for scribbling, which commonly took the form of lengthy letters written to those she thought worthy of her correspondence.  She had diligently read every volume of letters, which she could lay hands on, of persons whose performance was at all renowned in this department of literature (foreign ones in translations), and was by way of being an agreeable rattle, albeit of a pinchbeck, provincial genus.  Miss Spraggs was much courted by her relations, who were genuinely proud of her local literary reputation.  Also, let it be said, that she had the disposal of capital bringing in five hundred a year.

Montague’s eldest son, Harold, was, at once, the pride and grief of the Devitts, although custom had familiarised them with the calamity attaching to his life.

He had been a comely, athletic lad, with a nature far removed from that of the other Devitts; he had seemed to be in the nature of a reversion to the type of gentleman, who, it was said, had imprudently married an ancestress of Montague’s first wife.  Whether or not this were so, in manner, mind, and appearance Harold was generations removed from his parents and brother.  He had been the delight of his father’s eye, until an accident had put an end to the high hopes which his father had formed of his future.  A canal ran through Melkbridge; some way from the town this narrowed its course to run beneath a footbridge, locally known as the “Gallows” bridge.