The hours were composed mostly of dull or rebellious moments during the
period of Theodora's engagement to Mr. Brown. From the very first she
had thought it hard that she should have had to take this situation,
instead of Sarah or Clementine, her elder step-sisters, so much nearer
his age than herself. To do them justice, either of these ladies would
have been glad to relieve her of the obligation to become Mrs. Brown,
but Mr. Brown thought otherwise.
A young and beautiful wife was what he bargained for.
To enter a family composed of three girls--two of the first family, one
almost thirty and a second very plain--a father with a habit of
accumulating debts and obliged to live at Bruges and inexpensive foreign
sea-side towns, required a strong motive; and this Josiah Brown found
in the deliciously rounded, white velvet cheek of Theodora, the third
daughter, to say nothing of her slender grace, the grace of a young
fawn, and a pair of gentian-blue eyes that said things to people in the
first glance.
Poor, foolish, handsome Dominic Fitzgerald, light-hearted, débonair
Irish gentleman, gay and gallant on his miserable pension of a broken
and retired Guardsman, had had just sufficient sense to insist upon
magnificent settlements, certainly prompted thereto by Clementine, who
inherited the hard-headedness of the early defunct Scotch mother, as
well as her high cheek-bones. That affair had been a youthful
mésalliance.
"You had better see we all gain something by it, papa," she had said.
"Make the old bore give Theodora a huge allowance, and have it all fixed
and settled by law beforehand. She is such a fool about money--just like
you--she will shower it upon us; and you make him pay you a sum down as
well."
Captain Fitzgerald fortunately consulted an honest solicitor, and so
things were arranged to the satisfaction of all parties concerned except
Theodora herself, who found the whole affair far from her taste.
That one must marry a rich man if one got the chance, to help poor,
darling papa, had always been part of her creed, more or less inspired
by papa himself. But when it came to the scratch, and Josiah Brown was
offered as a husband, Theodora had had to use every bit of her nerve and
self-control to prevent herself from refusing.
She had not seen many men in her nineteen years of out-at-elbows life,
but she had imagination, and the one or two peeps at smart old friends
of papa's, landed from stray yachts now and then, at out-of-the-way
French watering-places, had given her an ideal far, far removed from the
personality of Josiah Brown.