CHAPTER I.
HARD YOUNG HEARTS Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.
The house was still as for a battle.

It was holding its breath to hear what was going on in the front parlour, the door of which seemed to wear an expression of being more than usually closed.

A mournful half-light fell through a little stained-glass vestibule into a hat-racked hall, on the walls of which hung several pictures of those great steamships known as "Atlantic liners" in big gilt frames--pictures of a significance presently to be noted.

A beautiful old eight-day clock ticked solemnly to the flickering of the hall lamp.

From below came occasionally a furtive creaking of the kitchen stairs.