Denzil had a small patrimony to lead off with, and that he dissipated before he left college; thenceforth he was dependent upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature.  His earlier poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting in their moral tone, that his reputation was great among the virtuous, who form the larger portion of the English book-buying public.  Election-seasons called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of the Tory party.  Dialer possessed undoubted fluency, but did tittle, though Sir Austin was ever expecting much of him.

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme.  Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend.  By degrees she tolerated him.  In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

              “For I am not the first who found
               The name of Mary fatal!”

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper’s.

Such was the outline of the story.  But the baronet could fill it up.  He had opened his soul to these two.  He had been noble Love to the one, and to the other perfect Friendship.  He had bid them be brother and sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham.  In fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle.  He forgave the man:  he put him aside as poor for his wrath.  The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way.  Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good deeds.  But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his equal.  She had blackened the world’s fair aspect for him.