Old Mr.Boyce came up from Mellor to see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's face and white head might have been observed at many a London party beside the small Italianate physique of his son.
And love, as he is wont, came in the wake of fortune.

A certain fresh west-country girl, Miss Evelyn Merritt, who had shown her stately beauty at one of the earliest drawing-rooms of the season, fell across Mr.
Richard Boyce at this moment when he was most at ease with the world, and the world was giving him every opportunity.

She was very young, as unspoilt as the daffodils of her Somersetshire valleys, and her character--a character of much complexity and stoical strength--was little more known to herself than it was to others.

She saw Dick Boyce through a mist of romance; forgot herself absolutely in idealising him, and could have thanked him on her knees when he asked her to marry him.
Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then--a crash.

It was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife, and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities of Dick Boyce himself.