Beyond the Rocks

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.