Joint guardians

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The General was fond of his wife and proud of her ; and. yet he was man of the world enough to ask himself sometimes, with a certain sense of uneasiness, whether after all he had not perhaps been " caught" as the phrase goes by a clever woman, with designs upon his fortune, and made a tool of, when he most aspired to be lord and master. He knew, of course, that gossiping or ill-natured tongues dropped hints to this effect. Mrs. Tempest, albeit not more than twenty years his junior, looked so much younger than her age, that only the existence of her handsome dashing son and grown-up daughter convinced the world that there was not even greater discrepancy in the ages of the newly married pair. She had too much good taste to affect a juvenility of dress or deportment unsuited to her years, yet possibly she looked all the younger for the richness and soberness of the attire which, even as a bride, she selected for herself ; at any rate, she looked a good ten years younger than her real age, and only a keen physiognomist would have detected in the fine lines forming round the clear dark eyes and in the set of the delicate lips indications of power, concentration, and strength of will only to be found in the more mature stages of life. And what had been the history of Mrs. Tempest's two-and-forty years? Was it a noble or a sordid nature that lay hidden away beneath that calm exterior? A question, in truth, more easily asked than answered ; one for which she would have been puzzled to have found a reply, had she ever put it to herself.
This beautiful youthful-looking woman fiad led a hard life not the less hard, perhaps, that it had been passed amid every outward luxury and indulgence. She had been one of six sisters, daughters of an impoverished baronet, brought up to believe that the aim and object of life was to make a good marriage and obtain an independent establishment. Claudia had been married at seventeen to a man of apparently large fortune, but this fortune had been gradually dissipated by lavish expenditure, gambling or racing, and after twelve years of unhappy married life Mrs. Edgeler found herself a widow with two children to support, and only some fifteen thousand pounds left out of the wreck of her husband's fortune...

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