When very young, she had been married, or rather, given in marriage, to a man who in a very few weeks after that ill-fated union had shown himself to be perfectly unworthy of her.
Her story, or so much of it as was known to her friends, was this.
Her father had been a clergyman in Dorsetshire, burdened with a small income, and blessed with a large family.

She who afterwards became Lady Fitzgerald was his eldest child; and, as Miss Wainwright--Mary Wainwright--had grown up to be the possessor of almost perfect female loveliness.

While she was yet very young, a widower with an only boy, a man who at that time was considerably less than thirty, had come into her father's parish, having rented there a small hunting-box.
This gentleman--we will so call him, in lack of some other term--immediately became possessed of an establishment, at any rate eminently respectable.

He had three hunters, two grooms, and a gig; and on Sundays went to church with a prayer-book in his hand, and a black coat on his back.

What more could be desired to prove his respectability?
He had not been there a month before he was intimate in the parson's house.