He had travelled much in his pursuit of metallurgy and chemistry; at forty he saw rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth.

What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life?
He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical men of his cynical period.
He arrived therefore at the decision that he would marry some young and buxom creature of decent birth and fit in appearance to be a peeress, and decided on Arbella Rossiter.
After a gulp or two and several _moues_ behind his back, she accepted him.

A brilliant marriage ceremony followed, conducted by a Bishop and an Archdeacon.

And then Arbella was carried off to live in a Bluebeard's Castle he possessed on the Northumbrian coast.
In the three years following her marriage she gave him two boys, with which he was content, especially as his own health began to fail a little just then.

At the end of four years of marriage with this cynical, Italianate tyrant, Arbella got very sick of him and thought more and more tenderly of a certain subaltern in the Cavalry whom she had once declined to marry on L500 a year.