While he was a curate, working very hard in a great seaport town, he had married the daughter of another clergyman of the city, who died in a sudden fashion as the result of an accident, leaving the girl an orphan.

She was not pure English as her mother had been a Dane, but on both sides her descent was high, as indeed was that of Mr.Knight himself.
This union, contracted on the husband's part largely from motives that might be called charitable, since he had promised his deceased colleague on his death bed to befriend the daughter, was but moderately successful.

The wife had the characteristics of her race; largeness and liberality of view, high aspirations for humanity, considerable intelligence, and a certain tendency towards mysticism of the Swedenborgian type, qualities that her husband neither shared nor could appreciate.

It was perhaps as well, therefore that she died at the birth of her only son, Godfrey, three years after her marriage.
Mr.Knight never married again.

Matrimony was not a state which appealed to his somewhat shrunken nature.