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.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask.  Mrs. Doria Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private, was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a feather on her brother’s Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life would be resumed.  There are times when common men cannot bear the weight of just so much.  Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought him immensely improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person could be so designated; and seeing that Hippias received in consequence free quarters at Raynham, and possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it is profitable to know his thoughts.  If the baronet had given two or three blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived people generally, as he did his relatives and intimates.  He was too sick for that:  fit only for passive acting.