His wife had lived in his house for ten years, his daughter for twenty.

By dint of time he learned to know her as he had never known her mother.

At twenty she married his chaplain.
The chaplain was a tall, stooping, fleckless, flawless, mannerless, joyless personage, middle-aged at twenty-eight, with a voice like a gong, with a metallic mind constructed of thought-tight compartments, devoted body and soul to the Church, an able and indefatigable worker, smelted from the choice ore of that great middle class from which, as we know, all good things come.

That he was a future ornament, or at any rate an iron girder of the Church was sufficiently obvious.
The Bishop saw his worth, and ruefully endured him until the chaplain, in the most suitable language, desired to become his son-in-law, and that at the most inconceivably awkward moment, namely, just when the Bishop had presented him with a living.

The marriage had to be.